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Of course. Most modern mathematicians aren't fluent with half the material in (the ~100 year-old text) Whittaker and Watson "A Course of Modern Analysis". Thi
by stephencanon 11y ago
Of course. Most modern mathematicians aren't fluent with half the material in (the ~100 year-old text) Whittaker and Watson "A Course of Modern Analysis". This was standard material even 60 years ago. You can get a PhD in mathematics today without once seeing an elliptic function, because computers are good enough at numerically solving the problems they were once used to solve symbolically.
- cbd1984 11y agoHow many people know how to multiply two numbers expressed in Roman numeral format without reference to an algorism (not a typo!) or other methods based on Hindu-Arabic numerals? How many people are fast at computing fifth roots without recourse to computational tools such as Hindu-Arabic numerals? Are those things math or arithmetic?
- knodi123 11y ago> multiply two numbers expressed in Roman numeral format without reference to an algorism (not a typo!) Thanks for making me waste my entire afternoon on wikipedia.
- xamuel 11y agoOn the other hand, most modern mathematicians know stuff that would blow Whittaker and Watson's socks off. Much mathematics is obsoleted. For example, there was a lot of incredibly difficult mathematics for finding areas under curves, which was all completely obsoleted with the discovery of the fundamental theorem of calculus. Nothing of value was lost. Individual pieces of mathematics come and go from general awareness, but the overall trend is definitely one of increasing, not decreasing, understanding.