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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?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 05 2018, @09:35AM (6 children)
Let's start with something more fundamental: Elementary logic. It's really astonishing how many people already fail at that.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 05 2018, @03:42PM (4 children)
On a related one, what is the scientific term for "God does not exist - it is a fictional story someone made up. You have to be really stupid to seriously believe that gibberish."?
Although a little dash of elementary logic aught to be enough to see through that old fairy tale, realistically it will take much more than that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 05 2018, @06:06PM (1 child)
You don't need a fancy word for that because it doesn't fit in that hypothesis [gsu.edu].
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Monday February 05 2018, @06:43PM
The problem with including God in scientific theories is to find a proper control group.
"Good morning, thanks for your time. Before we get started, we need you to form a line on the left if you have been formally Forsaken By The All-Loving Almighty. Please be ready to confess whatever sin and show your evidence of divine punishment, then fill out Page 2 of Form 12B, acknowledging that you will make every effort not to repent before this study ends."
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday February 05 2018, @06:35PM
Occam's Razor?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Monday February 05 2018, @07:04PM
Opinion.
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Tuesday February 06 2018, @12:16AM
You can see up the comment tree, I list (formal) logic along with statistics as 2 most important areas to learn concepts from these days, so I agree with you on that. The trouble with elementary logic is, it's not what most people would describe as elementary. The thought process of a logician is almost exactly the opposite of a though process which brings the most success in the real life. Out there in the world of sex and weather, the brain wins by taking hundreds, may be thousands of variables, and making an instant bayesian inference for an answer to a question like "should I schedule my wedding on June 1?" In the world of mathematical reasoning, just 2 or 3 premises are taken into account before painstakingly writing up, on paper or in one's mind, an algebraic inference of another formal statement.
Within the college curriculum for example, the first time students get a real good look at the elementary logic is past intermediary algebra, so I would say it's about as elementary as statistics. There are fewer concepts, but they are more abstract, and with more emphasis on proof, even mathy students can get overwhelmed easily.