mathmatics education in the future

[CPL.Luke]

a though occured to me the other day, 200 years ago the highest level of mathmatics any mathmatician was educated to was calculus

 

100 years ago we started having to educate young mathmaticians to the level of linear algebra and vector calc (probably a couple others that I am unaware of) Learning these additional subjets requires several additional years of training.

 

today a mathmatician requires 6-8 years of schooling in order to be trained to the level where they can do real work that actually effects the field that their in.

 

My question is what will we do in anouther 100 years when it takes 8-10 years of training to be an effective mathmatician? or even further down the line when it requires 15 years of training to understand all thats been done up till now in your field.

 

 

what are your thoughts?

[PhDP]

I think the trend is toward more specialization and working in small teams, but not having necessarily a longer education (it's true for all science).

[5614]

Yep. I agree.

 

Trends have shown that whereas in the old days a mathematician could basically do any sort of mathematics today, whilst they all have the same fundemental background in mathematics, they have different specialities.

 

This is because the maths is becoming a lot more complex and it is becoming virtually impossible for one person to know everything.

[CPL.Luke]

I wonder what the long term effect of that trend is on our ability to make sudden learps forward in science, I know that back in the 19th and early 20th century a relatively small group of people was able to make a large number of major advances in math and physics. maybe this was a side effect of having people who really got the big picture.

[5614]

maybe this was a side effect of having people who really got the big picture.

That's a good point and I agree.

 

So now we have our more specialised people where does that put us?

 

That we'll have advances in specific fields only?

 

Or maybe it underlies the importance of working in a group so everyone can combine their specialism, and together all the specialists would be darn clever.

 

Maybe this is why a Grand Unified Theory is becoming harder. As well as all the obvious technicalities regarding QM, relativity and string theory there's also the fact that no one is a specialist in all 3 (or even any 2). How can you combine QM with relativity if you can only be a specialist in one? This is just an example, and not an amazing one at that, but you get the point, I hope!

[Dave]

I can't see mathematics education changing drastically any time soon, since it seems to work fairly well. I spent the first two years learning general mathematics (analysis, linear algebra, and the like) in order to specialize more in my third and fourth years. As it happens, I took a more general variety of modules in my third year and now I know that I'm going to specialize in computation mathematics for my MMath.

 

One of the major problems that the mathematics institute faces at Warwick is the growing gap between A-level and university mathematics. In fact, the first year course has had to be completely re-written to accommodate a lacking of knowledge in areas such as basic complex analysis. Right now, I really think this is the more pertinant problem.

[ajb]

I think it does take something like 8 to 10 years to become anything like an working mathematician, 3 or 4 for the undergraduate training, another 3 or 4 postgrad (MSc + PhD) and then a few years working as a post doc. It is a long time, loads of work and little financial gain.