Hey guys,

 

I talked with a guy who studies mathematics and he told me that his friends from collage found their "limits" (mostly in third grade) and now the don't have a clue what's going on, and just learn mechanically like medival scholars did. He also told me that only some chosen ones still understand it. Does anyone you know of feel a similar effect?

 

And now something completly diffrent, will you press (softly, of course) on your child to do math?

Deja vu...

 

Anyway, not yet.

And yes, my children will be the mathematical geniuses of the 21st century if I have anything to do with it :D

It will be grievous to have a limit on high school....

I the UK, I found A-level maths to be very much like that. I had no real idea what I was doing.

 

Quite often when I speak to applied mathematicians they also don't know what they are doing. Well, what I mean is often they are not so clear on some of the structures behind the work they are doing. (one example is tensors on Euclidean spaces and not being clear with upper and lower indices). Physicists can also often be like that, but that will depend on who you talk to and their personal tastes.

 

I think in reality one needs to find a happy medium. It would be nice to have a great, precise clear understanding of everything, but sometimes you may just have to accept that "something works", otherwise you will be continually reproving well known (and well understood by some) results.

Of course there are some things we can't understand on the first sight, but like Feynmann said: "It's like a park with huge number of ways. If you can't find one, there are some other reaching the same place."

Or other point of view, everything must be proved so folowing the prove must lead to understanding. Could this be a way to avoid incomprehension?

 

Pq

Or other point of view, everything must be proved so folowing the prove must lead to understanding. Could this be a way to avoid incomprehension?

 

Pq

 

Not all proofs are easy to follow unless you work in that field, and even then it may be quite specialised. In principle, it would be nice to follow every proof ever written about every theorem, but just on a practical issue that would be impossible for a single person to do in a life time.

 

One just has to accept that one can't know it all.

I'm surprised that the fact that mathematicians don't know anything is not common knowledge. I mean people are so surprised when I tell them there are lots of things my math teacher doesn't know...

 

Cheers,

 

Gabe

I'm surprised that the fact that mathematicians don't know anything is not common knowledge. I mean people are so surprised when I tell them there are lots of things my math teacher doesn't know...

 

Cheers,

 

Gabe

 

I can't speak for maths teachers, but generally a practising mathematician will know lots of "general" mathematics and then know a lot about a specific field or even fields, but then only really understand in great detail and make contributions to a small part of that.

 

I like to know about as much as I can about mathematics, theoretical particle physics and string theory, but then I only really understand and work on a much smaller subset of that.

There is always going to be more that you don't know than you do, for any field of study.