Notorious QIG posted:

the fact that kids arent learning why A=1/2 b*h is the fault of our overall educational problems, the same reason that kids learn to hate reading and loathe team sports. there are plenty of good teachers who do teach where stuff comes from, theyre just drowned out by the general shittiness of our educational system.

also you cant teach math like you teach painting. there are famous painters who did nothing but throw buckets of paint onto canvases and theyre considered revolutionary. you cant just throw math at a canvas and see what sticks, there are rules. you need to know the rules before you can learn how to stretch them and do cool poo poo, the problem is that the rules themselves are taught really poorly as is the logic behind those rules

Notorious QIG posted:

ok, i get that, but there are parts of math that have direct practical value and the goal of school should be first and foremost to prepare students for the real world. if i was a math teacher i think id pick teaching something like stat or finance over something like non-euclidean geometry since way more students will actually find that helpful and applicable once theyre no longer in school

Deacon of Delicious posted:

aw, it's just a parallelogram what turned into a box made of six parallelograms. like a parallelogram cube

Broken Machine posted:

I disagree with your premise, that practical skills are what is needed. What is most important to learn, in my view, is how to learn and a desire to think creatively.

Also, consider that a lot of the discoveries that come along and propel our society forward in fundamental ways started out as someone daydreaming. It was decades after Maxwell came along that we had working long distance electrical distribution, but without his work it wouldn't have happened.

So I don't know; maybe we could track things like the Germans do. People who are afforded to a good math education and go "you know what, this just isn't my thing" can go take stats and finance. But daydreaming about spheres is important too, and students who want to learn that should have the option. Because right now a lot of potentially brilliant mathematicians never have that opportunity.

LP0 ON FIRE posted:

the monty hall problem has been the biggest mind gently caress ever for me in quite a while, but after writing out a table you do indeed have a 2/3 chance over 1/3 chance of getting the prize if you switch your answer. wtf? my brain just doesn't want to accept it

Share Bear posted:

he could've saved a lot of time if he had said cube and asked you to figure out things for a cube or sphere rather than something i had to search the internet to find what it was

LP0 ON FIRE posted:

the monty hall problem has been the biggest mind gently caress ever for me in quite a while, but after writing out a table you do indeed have a 2/3 chance over 1/3 chance of getting the prize if you switch your answer. wtf? my brain just doesn't want to accept it

LP0 ON FIRE posted:

the monty hall problem has been the biggest mind gently caress ever for me in quite a while, but after writing out a table you do indeed have a 2/3 chance over 1/3 chance of getting the prize if you switch your answer. wtf? my brain just doesn't want to accept it

Deacon of Delicious posted:

well a cube is easy to deal with, a parallelepiped is something different so it makes for a more interesting example of how to approaching a thing you aren't sure about. the book is called how to solve it, not h*w*l

Share Bear posted:

run into these incredibly frustrating levels of abstraction or assumption on the reader constantly

Notorious QIG posted:

i agree that the daydream aspects of math are also important but lol if u think that matters more for a functioning society than, say, teaching kids how to properly budget their finances

Notorious QIG posted:

primary and secondary education should primarily be there to acclimate students to the realities of the world around them, and that includes practical math. art and music and whatnot should be taught so they have a cultural understanding of society, math should be taught primarily so that they can understand the math theyll have to deal with on a day-to-day basis

Broken Machine posted:

Arithmetic involves numbers and is mathematics as much as being able to write the alphabet is to knowing how to read. A necessary but not sufficient condition if you will. Knowing how to balance a budget is a good life skill but I'd hesitate to call it mathematics just because it involves numbers.

it's only more important to society if you want to go see the stars. I would like for us to see the stars some day.



I'm of the opinion that math could be as much a cultural staple as music or art, as in a sense it is the most abstract of arts. I suppose that's one of the disconnects here - you see math primarily as a tool for solving problems whereas I see it as being able to do that, but also much more than just that. It's not just a science or an art, but both.

Share Bear posted:

thanks... nerd

it is written for a teaching perspective, like you're supposed to know what these things are already if i remember correctly

i'm really bad at higher level math and am trying every day to get better, but i run into these incredibly frustrating levels of abstraction or assumption on the reader constantly

Share Bear posted:

expand the question to 1 million doors for a better way of finding the proof

you initially choose 1 door from a million, monty closes 999998 of them, and asks you to chose again

of course you switch, as your odds are now much better

computer parts posted:

think of it as a choice between picking one door or two doors

There's three options: Car, Goat A, Goat B

if you pick one door, the probability you have a goat is 2/3 (Goat A or Goat B)

if you pick two doors, the probability that both are goats is (2/3)(1/2) = 1/3

LP0 ON FIRE posted:

yeah i've seen this analogy a lot, and i see how that works, but if have 3 doors and remove one, you're left with two doors which seems like a 50/50 chance

Deacon of Delicious posted:

well, there's never been a better time to try and get better at this stuff. it's maybe not super fun to have to stop and look a thing up on the internet, but we can and that's great. it's tough when you don't know what you don't know, and sometimes you have to go back and check out the fundamentals. what kinda math are you looking at?

Notorious QIG posted:

monty hall also always reminds me of my other favorite non-intuitive probability question:

you meet a couple who tells you that they have two children, at least one of whom is a boy. assuming boys and girls are equally likely, what is the probability that the other child is also a boy?

1/3

Notorious QIG posted:

monty hall also always reminds me of my other favorite non-intuitive probability question:

you meet a couple who tells you that they have two children, at least one of whom is a boy. assuming boys and girls are equally likely, what is the probability that the other child is also a boy?

1/3

LP0 ON FIRE posted:

Deacon of Delicious posted:

1/3 boy
1/3 girl
1/3 doesn't subscribe to your gender binary

Notorious QIG posted:

solution:

with no information, there are four options
1) girl/girl
2) girl/boy
3) boy/girl
4) boy/boy

since at least one child is a boy, option 1 is eliminated. there are now three remaining options, of which only one has both children being boys. the intuitive answer, 1/2, is true only if the couple specifies which child is a boy

Notorious QIG posted:

monty hall also always reminds me of my other favorite non-intuitive probability question:

you meet a couple who tells you that they have two children, at least one of whom is a boy. assuming boys and girls are equally likely, what is the probability that the other child is also a boy?

1/3

Share Bear posted:

i did the math on this one to check it, and this one feels like a problem with how the question is phrased to extract the independent-birth answer then being all about not reading the problem properly

Notorious QIG posted:

solution:

with no information, there are four options
1) girl/girl
2) girl/boy
3) boy/girl
4) boy/boy

since at least one child is a boy, option 1 is eliminated. there are now three remaining options, of which only one has both children being boys. the intuitive answer, 1/2, is true only if the couple specifies which child is a boy

Deacon of Delicious posted:

if 0.99999.... = an airplane on a treadmill transporting a helicopter on a turntable, and monty picks a door that has a blue-eyed person, who leaves the island that night if both prisoner A and prisoner B remain silent?

Notorious QIG posted:

imhotep is invisible

Notorious QIG posted:

imhotep is invisible

Notorious QIG posted:

primary and secondary education should primarily be there to acclimate students to the realities of the world around them, and that includes practical math. art and music and whatnot should be taught so they have a cultural understanding of society

rotor posted:

ok so dance is important for ~reasons~ but how geometry works on a sphere is just plain frivolous. let me just write this down.

rotor posted:

ok so dance is important for ~reasons~ but how geometry works on a sphere is just plain frivolous. let me just write this down.

Notorious QIG posted:

for the last loving time i do not think that the more naval-gazy maths are unimportant, i think that theyre irrelevant to the vast majority of the population. ffs im the kind of person who reads math stuff for fun when im bored, i understand the beauty and practical implications and etc etc

im also not an educator so wgaf about my opinions about primary/secondary math education, ill stop posting about 'em if you stop talking about 'em

Brain Candy posted:

i didn't know i was a math person until i took geometry. i hated the horrible reasonless memorization and it was boring. how the heck do you know it's irrelevant until you let people try it?

Brain Candy posted:

i hated the horrible reasonless memorization and it was boring