Math is hard

[liv]

Having encouraged everybody else to post short posts with links to other cool stuff, I should follow my own advice! Here's four very interesting and different responses to XKCD's Forgot Algebra comic:

• helens78 talks about the fact that loads of people commented on the comic agreeing with the attitude it's supposed to be satirizing... I loved every second of math I took in high school and college, and I use algebra on a daily basis (Her post also contains a detailed text description of the comic, so I'm not going to repeat her transcription.)
  
• yvi (who lives and was educated in Germany) is annoyed by people who are smug about not being able to do maths: These are subjects that belong to "general education" and somehow, sciences beyond maybe grade 6 or 7 aren't
  
• petra observes that anti-intellectual attitudes to languages can be just as bad: Americans are not in the least bit shy about how much of their time they have spent learning skills that they do not presently use
  
• rho gives a great example of how maths is useful in real life: It isn't the specific knowledge that's useful; it's the way of looking at the world

All very much worth reading, including the comment discussions attached. There, how's that for a brief pointer rather than a long essay (which might never get posted)?

Comments

[jack]

Hm. I knew lots of people had a very negative experience with maths (in fact, compare to recent comments about how many people hate sports because of experiences at school). But I didn't realise they overlapped so much with people who liked xkcd...

[jack]

Oh, but I agree with making maths less negative :)

[jack]

Oh, and obviously I use maths in everyday life all the time, but to be honest, it probably would be more useful in general if we had less calculus and more compound interest.

[ajnabieh]

A++ agree on compound interest. Also statistics, which is, in math terms (as I understand it, having only a limited stats education myself) basically only multiplication a million times, but, in conceptual terms, is basic to understanding anything about the world. Says I, a social scientist.

[liv]

I definitely agree that there should be more stats taught at a basic level. Whether it counts as part of maths is open to debate, but definitely worthwhile. Also probability, though again that may come under the heading of "stats" depending on your exact definitions.

I also really like the way that some continental schools (France is the example I'm most familiar with) teach everybody at least some elementary philosophy. Knowing exactly what Plato wrote is not particularly useful, but having some clue about the sorts of things philosophy can do would be a great help.

[liv]

I largely agree with rho that maths is useful because it gives you a way of looking at things, more than because on a day-to-day basis you employ the specific manipulations you were taught in GCSE maths. I think just about the only thing from school I've ever used directly is changing the fuse in a plug (and even that isn't very useful any more, cos they made plugs non user modifiable). Well, that's a slight exaggeration, but only a slight one. But that doesn't mean everything I learned in school is "useless"! For example I learned a lot of meta-stuff about how to learn, and maths gives you a different subset of that from pretty much any other subject.

[liv]

I think what happened with XKCD is that it got so popular that pretty much everybody on the internet reads it. And honestly Randall doesn't make that many maths jokes, these days. It's like how Beatles songs mess up music matching algorithms, cos basically everybody listens to the Beatles at some point, so it's almost entirely useless for predicting their other tastes!