Category Archives: Math

A Project not Requiring Japanese Steel

Posted on by

Kill Math

A project investigating a different way to present math and manipulate mathematical information, leveraging today’s technology.

The power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols.
…
We are no longer constrained by pencil and paper. The symbolic shuffle should no longer be taken for granted as the fundamental mechanism for understanding quantity and change. Math needs a new interface.

The site contains an interesting premise — the problems with math instruction aren’t limited to the methodology (a problem pointed out in any number of Vi Hart videos), but also the material itself:

school math is useless, kills inspiration and curiosity, is mind-numbingly tedious, makes no connections to anything, and is forgotten immediately after the test. It’s all negative.

which is also often true of science instruction.

Make sure not to miss

— The animations in the section “A Possibly Embarrassing Personal Anecdote,” which are pretty neat — as visualization of the integral, but also an intriguing visualization of an equation

— The video Interactive Exploration of a Dynamical System, which shows a model of a predator-prey system and the ways one can manipulate the equations to visualize how the variables behave.

Fun With Dick and Jane's Bar-Graph Software

Posted on by

Even More Fun With Charts: Making the Poor Look Rich

Lies, damned lies and statistics brought to life in the tale of three bar graphs.

From one of the included links

[I]f you add up all the lines of income over $200,000, you get around $2 trillion. (I may be off, because I’m eyeballing it, but I’m not off by much.) That obviously far exceeds the nearly $1.4 trillion accruing to the $100-200,000 set. And it undermines rather than bolsters (though does not disprove) Reihan’s argument that “the collective political influence of the upper-middle-class is greater than that of the ultra-rich.”

And it’s true that the collective influence of the middle class is greater than that of the rich. If our foundational principles included “one economic class, one vote,” there might be a point to the WSJ graph. But since it’s one person, one vote, you have to normalize the income by the number of people.

Leaving CorVegas

Posted on by

desperately seeking sonya

Jen-Luc Piquant and I are heading out to Oregon State University today, as I am a featured speaker at OSU’s first Sonia Kovaleskaya Mathematics Day, honoring the prominent Russian female mathematician of the same name.

I am contractually obligated to link to activities involving Oregon State. So, here you go.

Why Humanities People Should Care About Math

Posted on by

Guest Post: Why Humanities People Should Care About Math

Anyone in the traditionally “humanistic” fields (what a dumb term) would see this as a great instance of why it’s awesome to know foreign languages: you can’t be left out of the conversation. No one can pull the wool over your eyes. You can’t be the butt of a joke perpetrated right in front of your face. By knowing a foreign language, you remove an invisible barrier between you and the rest of the world.

One of my colleagues (with kids, and very involved in their education) has made the point that if more effort were made to point out that math is a language, then there might be less of a tendency to let people slide in learning it.

Campaign claims, legislation, environmental movements… even the weather — they’re all conducted with copious references to mathematics, usually in the form of statistics. And the simple fact is, I can convince you of just about anything if I whip out the right statistics and you’re not sure what I’m doing.

Not everything, of course, as it’s been recently observed (again). But convinced of a lot.

Cheaters Defy Logic

Posted on by

Interesting. Many people suck at formal logic, but get much better when the problem is framed in terms of cheating.

Detecting Cheaters

Another way of saying this is that they turn over the “benefit received” card to make sure the cost was paid. And they turn over the “cost not paid” card to make sure no benefit was received. They look for cheaters.
The difference is startling. Subjects don’t need formal logic training. They don’t need math or philosophy. When asked to explain their reasoning, they say things like the answer “popped out at them.”

There’s also this:

People are just bad at the Wason selection task. They also tend to only take college logic classes upon requirement.

I took logic in college because it was a way of getting one of my humanities credits (taught by the philosophy department) with a class that was a lot like math.