Math is beautiful, useful and as valuable a part of our common culture
as music or poetry.
I think there no better subject to
study.
It is unfortunately a large hole in
education, particularly US education: math is taught, but poorly and at a low
level. This is not unique to math-philosophy is also little taught, and music
likewise but my love of math makes this
failure of education hurt all the keener .
I cannot here convey the joy nor
beauty of math :it is an unfamiliar beauty, yet deeply human and underlies many
other more familiar beauties.
Give it a shot , and you may find a new love
that`ll last a lifetime.
By unfamiliar I mean: explaining the
joy and beauty of math to someone for whom "math" means "long
division" is like explaining poetry to someone for whom
"English" means "spelling". If you have never read a
sentence, the beauty of poetry is
literally indescribable: it is completely alien. This is truly how different
serious math is from arithmetic.
Math is not primarily about doing
computations , but about abstract patterns and structures. Computations are a
necessary part of doing math , like spelling is to writing , but are not end
into themselves.
Some of these structures have the character of wit, of cleverness;
others are geometric, but a geometry that cannot be drawn and can only be
visualized indirectly, in your mind`s eye.
1 التعليقات:
Plus, just about anything you deal with in the material world : houses, buildings, roads, water pipes, cell phones, tools, plates, ..., "you-name-it",
has been first designed using math before production even begins!
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