This is a bit like the transition from Feynman
to Wolfram. Feynman was proud of his mental
arithmetic, calculating sums of a series,
square roots or cube roots manually (there
is some information in "Surely your joking
Mr. Feynman" about it). Wolfram thinks that
these kind of stunts in mental arithmetic
are not needed anymone, because computers
can figure it out much better and faster.
Stephen talks about Feynman here
http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/recent/feynman/
In agriculture, the famers dug their fields over
manually in former times. Today they use
tractors and large machines to break up the
soil. Computers are the tractors of mathematics.
They can be used to do the hard, boring parts of
the work. It is of course indispensable to know
what you doing.
-J.
----- Original Message -----
From: Pieter Steenekamp
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Sent: Sunday, November 28, 2010 8:06 AM
Subject: [FRIAM] Math education
In summary, this guy says that our math education is wrong. He defines math
broadly as the the process of (1) translating a problem to a mathematical
form; (2) deciding what result is required mathematically; (3) doing the
computation; and (4) interpreting the result. His point is that math
education focuses on doing the computation by hand whilst that could be done
very easily by computer. He reckons math education should focus on the
points 1,2 & 4 and let the computer do the computation.
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