On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 05:22:20PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > On 14 Mar 2014, at 10:11, Kim Jones wrote: > > > > > > >Craig, you have just explained to me the basis of my discalculia. > >No one else has ever managed to do that in all my 57 years. > > > >Music was always instantaneously understandable to me because of > >the way it gained my deep sensory participation whereas > >mathematics was always just a bunch of squiggles on paper that to > >me were as dry as dust and as terrifyingly remote as Egyptian > >hieroglyphs. Math evoked no sensuous universe of qualia - for me. > >I have often felt that for those with a high degree of numeracy, > >that the hieroglyphs of mathematics evoke the same sensory > >participation as music does for me. Bruno, for example composes > >and reads mathematical sentences with the same ease as I have in > >listening to even quite complex music and writing it down from ear > >in standard music notation. > > Not really. To be honest, it is work, a lot of work. And then I have > just plugged in works made by people certainly more gifted than me. > For most mathematicians, it is a question of patient learning. There > are virtuoses,but most mathematicians can be quickly out, when going > out of their expertise. >
For me mathematics works best when I can visualise it. For example, with the concept of covariant derivatives in Riemann spaces, if you picture the space being curved, then it is obvious that the derivative must take into account the way space twists and turns, ie how your ruler changes shape as you move through space, and since derivatives are linear, the component due to that twisting in turning is also linear, ie a tensor. Of course that is what is otherwise known as a Christoffel symbol. When I first came across Christoffel symbols, they appeared just like the heiroglyphics you mentioned above, along with a set of rules for their manipulation. It was exactly as you mention - dry as dust, and utterly mystifying. But with the latter picture, which I got through studying Misner, Thorne and Wheeler's excellent tome, it comes alive, and makes intuitive sense. Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
