Magnolia Sitter has linked to this very interesting article. The double standard of engineering students who don't like humanities versus humanities students who don't like math or science is especially interesting.
Also interesting to me is that in medieval education, the trivium and quadrivium consisted of grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, respectively. Of the seven courses in the original liberal arts curriculum, two were explicitly mathematical and three were closely related to mathematics.
To paraphrase Robert Anton Wilson, "Some people at the university specialized in manipulating mathematical symbols, others in verbal ones. Because the people who manipulated verbal symbols were better with language, they got to define themselves as the intellectuals."
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
The Most Important Image Ever Taken
According to this video, it is the Hubble Deep Field, and I'm inclined to agree. Whenever I look at it, I feel chills. This image, and the even higher resolution Ultra Deep Field, contain hundreds and hundreds of points, blobs, and smears of light. Each one is not a star, but an entire galaxy.
On the less inspired side of things, if you want to see something that manifests such intense stupidity and willful, possibly malevolent ignorance that it is capable of causing physical pain in those who watch it, go here.
The basic "idea", for those unwilling or unable to subject themselves to such gibbering imbecility, is staggeringly nonsensical, and incandescently moronic; a train wreck of epic cognitive ineptitude: Rainbows are a government conspiracy.
Or as the video says: "Everywhere we look, the visible spectrum, is rainbows. This cannot be natural." This is why we need math and science education with tough, rigorous, and reality-based curricula.
On the less inspired side of things, if you want to see something that manifests such intense stupidity and willful, possibly malevolent ignorance that it is capable of causing physical pain in those who watch it, go here.
The basic "idea", for those unwilling or unable to subject themselves to such gibbering imbecility, is staggeringly nonsensical, and incandescently moronic; a train wreck of epic cognitive ineptitude: Rainbows are a government conspiracy.
Or as the video says: "Everywhere we look, the visible spectrum, is rainbows. This cannot be natural." This is why we need math and science education with tough, rigorous, and reality-based curricula.
Friday, August 8, 2008
The Quest to Solve the Hardest Math Problem
A recent article (which appears not to be available online) in Mental Floss talked some about the quest to prove the Poincaré conjecture. It's the sort of thing that, at some level, seems to be true intuitively but is a nightmare to prove. One of the people who attempted to do so eventually quit math and took up poetry, another swore he would not marry until he proved it - and died a bachelor.
Between 2002 and 2003, a reclusive mathematician named Perelman posted online an outline of a proof, which was then filled out and verified by others. He refused the Fields Medal which the ICM offered him for this feat. Given that the conjecture was proposed in 1904, and this only after Poincaré himself found a flaw in his own proof, the problem went unsolved for over a hundred years.
As for Mental Floss, it is awesome. And they have a couple of articles in the "More" section that are math related: 5 Rap Songs That don't Make the Grade and a proof that Vampires are Mathematically Impossible. Which is flawed because the quoted author assumes that vampires turn everyone they feed on instead of killing most of them. To use Anne Rice's terminology, not everyone deserves the Dark Gift.
Between 2002 and 2003, a reclusive mathematician named Perelman posted online an outline of a proof, which was then filled out and verified by others. He refused the Fields Medal which the ICM offered him for this feat. Given that the conjecture was proposed in 1904, and this only after Poincaré himself found a flaw in his own proof, the problem went unsolved for over a hundred years.
As for Mental Floss, it is awesome. And they have a couple of articles in the "More" section that are math related: 5 Rap Songs That don't Make the Grade and a proof that Vampires are Mathematically Impossible. Which is flawed because the quoted author assumes that vampires turn everyone they feed on instead of killing most of them. To use Anne Rice's terminology, not everyone deserves the Dark Gift.
“I don’t imitate nature. I try and understand her operating principles.”
As John Todd quotes Bucky Fuller in this interview. This is a vision of ecology, industry, and design that uses natural processes as inspiration. It will take me a while to absorb so much exciting thought. There is an example of this sort of design at the NC Estuarium, which is next to a wetlands that was built to clean the runoff from the town of Washington before releasing it into the Pamlico Sound. It is home to muskrats, dragonflies, turtles, birds, fish, lily pads, and algae.
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