Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Arthur Benjamin's Proposal for Changing Maths Education

See this video, pointed out to me by my recently graduated M.Sc. student Arnar Birgisson. It is well worth spending three minutes looking at.

I guess that many readers of this blog will like the message in this position video :-)


6 comments:

Kostas said...

And I was sure he was going to say "logic" :D Wishful thinking. But then his analogy of analog versus digital would be perfect.

Arnar Birgisson said...

I was expecting logic as well. I'll repeat my comment from reddit.com:

Analysis (or Calculus) is certainly the wrong peak - but I'm not sure probability and statistics are the right one.

He's right about one thing, we should focus on the "more modern" discrete math, but this is much more general than statistics.

Rather we should have some number theory, set theory, logic, relations and their classification, algebra and manipulating unknown and infinite sizes. These things, even though you may not encounter them in real-life, train our minds and gives a person an important ability to think abstractly and solve general problems - something that no amount of ε-δ proofs will provide. And with this background, probability theory becomes easy.

Luca Aceto said...

Arnar, Kostas, thanks for your comments. I agree with what you say, of course :-) After all, thanks to computer science, logic is the most applied branch of mathematics today. A focus on discrete maths, logic and algorithms would certainly be beneficial in changing mathematics education. However, this would require teachers who are well versed in those areas and I do not think that there many of those around.

A combinatorialist I know wrote to me saying:

"Yes, this will eventually change. Should have started happening 50 years ago, so it might happen within 40 years or so."

He does not sound overly optimistic, does he?

Term papers said...

Wow this video is fantastic, i watched its amazing...Thanks for sharing...

Term Papers said...

Congratulation, Such a nice video,i really enjoying video,really want to admire the singer, and a great costumes, Awesome work, Thanks for share this.

international carry on luggage size said...

What an amazing job you people are doing. I will keep visiting this blog very often. thanks for sharing it..