I taught at the Art and Design Center in Pasadena for twenty years - a range of subjects from automotive design to Renaissance technology. My students, very talented young women and men, gave you the Miata and the new VW Bug. We staff were troubled by the students' trouble with numbers. I noted at a faculty meeting that "literacy" meant you could write or read: a love letter, a legal document or an instruction manual, without knowing who Shakespeare was, or how to parse a sentence; so, in the same spirit, " numeracy" was needed.
I was given the task of designing a new course, teaching "numeracy", and did. It worked fairly well. For example, new students, having passed high school algebra and able to solve quadratics by rote, could not calculate how many square feet of carpet was needed for an irregular apartment floor, and worse, foot run if the carpet came in rolls X feet wide, and worser still, if the carpet roll was patterned! After my class they could! Just what designers needed! We developed a text, printed at the school, and a number of procedures, many graphical, that worked pretty well. Yuss, mathematics is too important to leave to mathematicians, speaking as a Caltech Ph.D. in that arcane discipline. I happen to have a strong aversion to the usage of "intuition", since I think it means nothing, except when one has some empirical experience of the subject, when it becomes "judgment". Other artistic usages are nuttin' but Voo Doo! Fer example, when I have seen its airlines and the stability derivatives I have pretty good "intuition" of how an aircraft will perform in the lateral mode, and my test pilot "intuits" the same thing from turns, spirals and spins in flight. Any thing else is BS! Be glad to discuss if anyone is doing something in the same spirit. As I have promised, everything discussed here is from direct experience. I don't have enuff imagination to speculate, or intuit!! Peter Lissaman, Da Vinci Ventures Expertise is not knowing everything, but knowing what to look for. 1454 Miracerros Loop South, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505,USA tel:(505)983-7728
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
