Posted on 05/01/2016 11:46:48 AM PDT by JimSEA
Mathematician Edward Frenkel was promoting his New York Times bestseller “Love and Math.”
Social scientist Andrew Hacker, on the other hand, caught my attention immediately after the New York Times published his article arguing for the elimination of algebra from our education system. We don’t need it anymore, he claimed,. It does us far more bad than good.
Hacker is a hit now. His anti-math book, “The Math Myth: And Other STEM Delusions” is holding its own against “Love and Math,” despite Frenkel’s book being translated into more than a dozen languages and Frenkel’s indefatigable popularization of the power, passion, and beauty of math.
Is Hacker a doublethinking Orwellian demonizer, or does have a point?
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One of the biggest problems for math is that very few us get shown the big picture by master mentors when we’re young the way Edward Frenkel was. Demonstrating an innate talent and passion for mathematics early on, Frenkel recounts in his book how world-class mathematician Israel Gelfand took him in. Every Monday night for nearly 50 years on the 14th floor of the Moscow university building Gelfand “would welcome all undergraduates, talented graduate students and brilliant professors… These meetings, which often lasted well into the night, were more like a social event than a traditional seminar, where a speaker would go to a blackboard and talk for an hour. He [Gelfand] would walk the aisles, stop and chat with people, interrupt and ask questions, pull a member of the audience to the blackboard and ask them to repeat what had just been said or to find a mistake in it. His interest was always in the development of the next generation of mathematicians." Not surprisingly, many of Gelfand’s former students and seminar participants are now prominent mathematicians.
(Excerpt) Read more at science20.com ...
Algebra and physics have a lot in common also...
As far as electrical engineering, Ohm’s Law is a simple example...
Let’s start by considering math majors in college. Except for the “best of the best,” it’s been my experience that most 3rd or 4th year math majors don’t understand half the stuff they’ve studied, nor do they have any notion as to how deeply connected the different branches of math truly are.
Okay -- the problem I would like to see solved is that the cashier at the supermarket is flummoxed when my bill comes to $90.25 and I hand then $100 bill and a quarter. They don't know what to do. Thinking deeply about 3rd year math majors is NOT the place to start solving this deficiency.
And this:
Imagine 4th graders being taught why time slows down for people who move relative to us.
Why THE HELL is anyone considering teaching Einstein's Theory of Relativity to 4th graders. This -- THIS -- is why 9-year-olds decide that they cannot ever understand math.
Algebra is essential to many of our yutes. When they get a career job at a pizza shop a customer might ask them which will give them more pizza, one 16 inch pizza or two 8 inch pizzas.
Well why not get rid of algebra anyway - we’ve gotten rid of history and social studies neither of which made kids feel good about themselves and girls are reputed to be math challenged so let’s just teach the good stuff like welfare studies, social justice and the like.
Maxwell’s equations.
Nothing to be afraid of. Just a little differential geometry.
By extension, ‘logic’ or logical thinking also out.
Math is truth and logic. Learning algebra is acquisition of these skills. Music as well as astronomy, for instance, are math in motion. Grammar is algebraic. The government school system leeches logic out of kids. Any idiot baby boomer who sent their kids to be brainwashed in these institutions, who trusted tgeseinstitutions is responsible for the idiocy running this country. I sent my kids to government school for one year so they could get a cultural education - to find out the insanity they’re going to have to live with
He would look great riding a bus at night through inner city Philadelphia .
A couple of saws ago I needed to get a zip tie for a 5” pipe. Sure was glad I had that little diameter x pi thingy in the back of my brain...
They don’t even need math...I once went to a chain restaurant and they closed temporarily because their computer was down and the cashier didn’t know how to make change...
Most people that are good at Math do not teach Math. Instead, they become engineers.
pie r squared?
So basically it is an area where anything can be considered correct or incorrect and has no real link to science at all.
No wonder Andrew Hacker sees no benefit in Algebra, or probably any other type of math for that matter. Too definitive with actual correct and incorrect answers.
Science? We doan need no steenkeeng science!
Can I just check out Danica McKellar?
She's got some nice figures.
I was good until Integral. I got Differential, after a couple of detours. And I get Integral conceptually, but I can't integrate anything but the simplest equation.
The Left hates math because it is absolute. 2 + 2 cannot equal whatever you want it to, and the equation doesn’t care how you “feel” about the answer. It’s either right or it’s wrong. Liberals struggle with that binary concept. Their whole world is shades of gray. They like to consider it nuanced; math — except for theorems and proofs, has no time for nuance.
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