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from the how-to-learn-mathematical-thinking dept.
Technology Review is running an unusual book review -- books about learning math, pure math, not applied math, https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/04/24/1071371/book-reviews-math-education/
The author admits to being adrift,
As a graduate student in physics, I have seen the work that goes into conducting delicate experiments, but the daily grind of mathematical discovery is a ritual altogether foreign to me. And this feeling is only reinforced by popular books on math, which often take the tone of a pastor dispensing sermons to the faithful.
An initial attempt led to a MasterClass by a "living legend of contemporary math", but the master is seated in a white armchair with no blackboards, pens or paper and does not enlighten.
A side story covers a writer for the New Yorker who plans a year to go back and learn the high school algebra/geometry/calculus that escaped him, but mostly fails. For backup he has a niece who is a math professor...but after months without getting it, he complains. Her answer?
"For a moment, think of it as a monastic discipline. You have to take on faith what I tell you." Where his niece and others see patterns and order, he perceives only "incoherence, obfuscation, and chaos"; he feels like a monk who sees lesser angels than everybody around him.
I won't spoil the end, but the author does make some progress with books by mathematician and concert pianist Eugenia Cheng, starting with "Cakes, Custard and Category Theory", where each chapter starts with an analogy to baking.
Unfortunately, for the SN audience, the article does not include any car analogies...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Sunday June 11 2023, @05:16PM (1 child)
https://xkcd.com/435/ [xkcd.com]
The old classic XKCD Purity cartoon. If you split the mathematician character in two it would make the strip much wider as the pure math people would be far far away from the rest of us. Those people are out there. While I do have a fairly extensive university education in math, it's main applied math. The pure math people still make my head hurt from time to time when I just think about it.
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Tuesday June 13 2023, @04:23AM
The problem with pure math is that people keep finding ways to apply it.