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What Scientific Term or Concept Ought to be More Widely Known?

posted by Fnord666 on Monday February 05 2018, @05:36AM   
from the common-sense dept.

canopic jug writes:

Mathematician Keith Devlin writes about how the capabilities to work with maths have changed since the late 1960s. He summarizes what he considers to be the essential skills and knowledge that people can focus on as more and more is turned over to software.

The shift began with the introduction of the digital arithmetic calculator in the 1960s, which rendered obsolete the need for humans to master the ancient art of mental arithmetical calculation. Over the succeeding decades, the scope of algorithms developed to perform mathematical procedures steadily expanded, culminating in the creation of desktop and cloud-based mathematical computation systems that can execute pretty well any mathematical procedure, solving—accurately and in a fraction of a second—any mathematical problem formulated with sufficient precision (a bar that allows in all the exam questions I and any other math student faced throughout our entire school and university careers).

So what, then, remains in mathematics that people need to master? The answer is, the set of skills required to make effective use of those powerful new (procedural) mathematical tools we can access from our smartphone. Whereas it used to be the case that humans had to master the computational skills required to carry out various mathematical procedures (adding and multiplying numbers, inverting matrices, solving polynomial equations, differentiating analytic functions, solving differential equations, etc.), what is required today is a sufficiently deep understanding of all those procedures, and the underlying concepts they are built on, in order to know when, and how, to use those digitally-implemented tools effectively, productively, and safely.

Source : What Scientific Term or Concept Ought to be More Widely Known?

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Original Submission

• Scribble on the back of a napkin Scribble on the back of a napkin (Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Monday February 05 2018, @06:05AM (3 children)

  by c0lo (156) on Monday February 05 2018, @06:05AM (#633149) Journal

  TFA

  The most basic of those new skills is number sense... describes students with a strong number sense like this: “[They] can think and reason flexibly with numbers, use numbers to solve problems, spot unreasonable answers, understand how numbers can be taken apart and put together in different ways, see connections among operations, figure mentally, and make reasonable estimates.”
  ...
  Though to outsiders, mathematics teaching designed to develop number sense can seem “fuzzy” and “imprecise,” it has been well demonstrated that children who do not acquire number sense early in their mathematics education struggle throughout their entire subsequent school and college years, and generally find themselves cut off from any career that requires some mathematical ability.

  Learning how to do computations on the back of the napkin is a valuable skill: you'll look to still be able capable to compute something* after a good meal in a restaurant with so much wine that your table palls can't contradict you** even if they'd be tempted to.

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  _{* for the purpose, the scribble doesn't need to make sense when sober}

  _{** that is, unless one of them have similar skills}

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  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford

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• Re:Scribble on the back of a napkin Re:Scribble on the back of a napkin (Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday February 05 2018, @06:44AM (1 child)

  by MostCynical (2589) on Monday February 05 2018, @06:44AM (#633166) Journal

  Ah, the B.A.C.* tarrif: whoever is drunk enough to put their credit card in without checking the bill gets to pay**

  * Blood Alcohol Concentration

  **only works in New South Wales, damn Victorian restaurants just happily divide the bill equally across all the cards offered.

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  "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex

  Parent

  • Re:Scribble on the back of a napkin (Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday February 05 2018, @06:49AM

    by c0lo (156) on Monday February 05 2018, @06:49AM (#633169) Journal

    damn Victorian restaurants just happily divide the bill equally across all the cards offered.

    Keeps the patrons honest - no matter how high their B.A.C.
    In turn, this encourages consumption.

    ^{(who said that honesty doesn't pay?)}

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    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford

    Parent

• Answer to headline question is in TFA! (Score: 4, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday February 05 2018, @12:55PM

  by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Monday February 05 2018, @12:55PM (#633258) Journal

  TFA

  The most basic of those new skills is number sense...

  Thanks for quoting that sentence, because it's actually the main point of TFA, which isn't at all clear from the summary. It seems discussion here has taken the form of a poll to answer the headline question (which is perhaps interesting discussion), but the author of TFA actually discusses his answer in great detail -- i.e., NUMBER SENSE.

  I find the summary here rather confusing given the actual content of TFA. The only two paragraphs quoted are arguably just the introduction to TFA. The next paragraph (as quoted by parent here) actually provides the answer to the headline question (i.e., "number sense"), and the remaining five paragraphs of TFA discuss what the author thinks "number sense" is, why it's important, etc.

  Again, it's interesting to discuss other possible answers to the headline question, but it's surprising to me that the summary here doesn't even mention the main topic of TFA.

  Parent