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'To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics' (quantamagazine.org)
Excerpts from an article on Quanta Magazine, rearranged for clarity and space: Math conferences don't usually feature standing ovations, but Francis Su received one last month in Atlanta. In his talk he framed mathematics as a pursuit uniquely suited to the achievement of human flourishing, a concept the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia, or a life composed of all the highest goods. Su talked of five basic human desires that are met through the pursuit of mathematics: play, beauty, truth, justice and love. Su opened his talk with the story of Christopher, an inmate serving a long sentence for armed robbery who had begun to teach himself math from textbooks he had ordered. After seven years in prison, during which he studied algebra, trigonometry, geometry and calculus, he wrote to Su asking for advice on how to continue his work. After Su told this story, he asked the packed ballroom at the Marriott Marquis, his voice breaking: "When you think of who does mathematics, do you think of Christopher?" If mathematics is a medium for human flourishing, it stands to reason that everyone should have a chance to participate in it. But in his talk Su identified what he views as structural barriers in the mathematical community that dictate who gets the opportunity to succeed in the field -- from the requirements attached to graduate school admissions to implicit assumptions about who looks the part of a budding mathematician. When Su finished his talk, the audience rose to its feet and applauded, and many of his fellow mathematicians came up to him afterward to say he had made them cry. [...] Mathematics builds skills that allow people to do things they might otherwise not have been able to do or experience. If I learn mathematics and I become a better thinker, I develop perseverance, because I know what it's like to wrestle with a hard problem, and I develop hopefulness that I will actually solve these problems. And some people experience a kind of transcendent wonder that they're seeing something true about the universe. That's a source of joy and flourishing.
Good thing for most of us in fields that are lumped into that acronym, the difficulty of the work generally selects for who ends up in those careers. Maybe if we encourage more people to stand and deliver then we simply won't need to import talent and we could legitimately scale back totals on H1B quotas citing graduation rates and test scores as why we don't need ao many foreign skilled workers.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Those would be the ones that took an illegal substance before solving for x.
Not all, but Erdos I think definitely fell into that category.
Probably not. Were amphetamines illegal then? For most of human history, the War on Drugs would have been an absurd concept (because it is an absurd concept). We have to make sure that genius mathematicians don't take all the amphetamines. Otherwise what will we pump our elementary school children full of!?
You're a moron if you think that the engineers and architects who designed those things didn't know advanced mathematics (geometry and algebra of that time).
The problem with test scores is that they don't mean shit except that you have either been an ass-kiss student who was used by a professor,
For the literature teacher who wants you to exalt their favorite author or the history/civics teacher who will give you a higher grade for parroting their political point of view, you might have a point.
One of the better points of science and math is that it's not quite as subject to that sort of kiss-assery. When you answer "What's 2+2" with the number 4, your teacher can't dock you points because they don't like the way you wrote the 4.
That's just... bullshit.
Is walking "accessible to anyone who really tries"? What if they have no legs?
Lots of people simply do not have the intellectual facilities -- not training, I'm talking about capacity here -- to even begin to approach mathematics beyond various levels. Every person is a mix of capacities and limits. To claim that undertaking X is accessible to any person who "really tries" demonstrates nothing more than that the claimant has very little understanding of people in general.
Or to look at it from the other end of the stick, you're not going to become Einstein just because you "really try."
We're not identical cupcakes spewed out by a cupcake factory, some of us missing the icing just because we went down a different conveyor belt.
Not yet, anyway.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I'm pretty good at math but I find it boring. I enjoy programming which is similar but for whatever reason I find it a lot more interesting
Me too. I think the big difference is the lack of feedback in math. If I work for hours or days to construct a proof, I don't really know if it is valid or not, and maybe it was all a waste of time because I made an error in the first few steps. With programming, I can test incrementally, fix errors as I go, and I can see the end result is valid because the program works. The feeling of accomplishment is much better.
Also, programming pays better.
The right teacher, someone like Richard Feynman:
Check out his book "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman".
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