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Physicists avoid highly mathematical work despite being trained in advanced mathematics, new research suggests. The study, published in the New Journal of Physics, shows that physicists pay less attention to theories that are crammed with mathematical details. This suggests there are real and widespread barriers to communicating mathematical work, and that this is not because of poor training in mathematical skills, or because there is a social stigma about doing well in mathematics.
Dr Tim Fawcett and Dr Andrew Higginson, from the University of Exeter, found, using statistical analysis of the number of citations to 2000 articles in a leading physics journal, that articles are less likely to be referenced by other physicists if they have lots of mathematical equations on each page. [...] Dr Higginson said: "We have already showed that biologists are put off by equations but we were surprised by these findings, as physicists are generally skilled in mathematics.
"This is an important issue because it shows there could be a disconnection between mathematical theory and experimental work. This presents a potentially enormous barrier to all kinds of scientific progress."
http://phys.org/news/2016-11-physicists-mathematics.html
[Abstract]: Statistical Analysis of the Effect of Equations on Citations
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ledow on Monday November 14 2016, @08:10AM
Math nerd here.
At 12 I was writing computer programs to calculate pi, from a formula based on a Taylor-series expansion.
My primary school teachers had said I was all-but useless at maths because I didn't sit down and learn the timetable and - at their demand - recite each perfectly without error in front of the entire class. Literally, by the end of the year, everyone else had their 12 stars for doing so and I think I'd done the 1's and 2's.
In secondary school, on the first day there, a teacher grabbed me (kindly, but immediately upon seeing me). That teacher INSISTED he was my only maths teacher until age 18. Why? Because he taught the top-set.
I was soon top of that school, of about 1000 kids. I now have a maths degree.
The reason - teaching by rote in primary school is a lot of shit, especially for maths. That's not maths. That's arithmetic at best. It's an awful way to learn. Just because you/your parents learned that way means nothing. It's an awful way to learn, still, and an awful way to teach maths.
If you are memorising, you are not doing maths.
If you do not derive, you're not doing maths.
If you do not work out from first principles, you're not doing maths.
If you do not tie it into areas that you learned yesterday, a year ago, 2 years ago, etc. all at the same time, you're not doing maths.
To this day, my arithmetic is average. I can do any sum or multiplication or division, but I do it by going back to first principles, not rote. I can do it from first principles in my head often faster than people can do it any other way. Fortunately, I'm surrounded by machines which can do arithmetic much better than I can - and that would have been true 200+ years ago too.
But my maths? I work in a private school - as an IT guy, my degree is maths and computer science - and I have embarrassed the maths teachers more than once. I like to walk up and correct their formulae on the board while they're teaching. I've had to sit and explain public-key encryption properly when teachers could only skip over it and say it was "something to do with primes". And I did it at a level that 10-year-olds got it. When you're an IT guy, people don't expect you to know maths inside-out.
And, actually, my strength is midway between maths and computer-science. I love graph theory, coding theory and others that are basically mathematics applied to computing principles. I can't program a game without finding the optimal mathematical algorithm for things. I just enjoy doing it.
The reason my teacher chose me from the crowd? I was doing maths FOR FUN at that age, 10, having come from a school where that kind of independent thought was all but openly discouraged and they had "generic" teachers who did not teach subjects but the whole class for the whole year. And because maths is what I did when I was bored.
To this day, I wonder what could have happened if that teacher had worked in my primary school too.
Every time I see "maths is too difficult", I mentally append "for me." You're not the only one in the school. And not teaching maths by rote helps immensely for understanding. I still encounter maths graduates who have NO IDEA where sine, cosine, etc. actually comes from - it's just a magic "by-rote" function for them that does something useful.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Monday November 14 2016, @11:46AM
How is your anecdotal exceptionalism relevant to the general population? How's having a teacher singling you out as a prodigy and mentoring you applies to everyone's curriculum?
This is the same mistake every novice athlete makes: They look at routines of exceptionally talented, advanced and often juiced athletes and mimic their routines. Ask any music prodigy that's successfully teaches music for a living and they'll confirm the same: While they didn't need nearly as much drilling and memorization, the vast majority of their students do.
This is exactly what's wrong here. People look at high achieving youth that are being schooled privately by excellent teachers and think this should somehow apply to their children. Worse, those youth later reach positions in academia that deprive them of the experience of teaching normal people and influence the curricula based on their anecdotal evidence.
And let be clear, we're talking about engineers, not theoretical physicist and mathematicians. People who actually do end up using calculus to design high-power infrastructure and machines on a daily basis NEED to know those identities. Programmers making algorithmic choices need to have all that "arithmetic at best" linear algebra and combinatorics as second nature so when they work on the code they be able to shift between representations on the fly like a musician switches keys reading sheet music.
Keeping it closer to home, pick up Zed Shaw's books and look up his essays. He's discussing these very same issues as relevant to teaching programming. It's elementary stuff. But so is high-school.
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