Comment on A fake Facebook event disguised as a math problem has been one of its top posts for 6 months
AbidanYre@lemmy.world 4 weeks agoIs it also lazy to learn Roy G. Biv to know the color spectrum instead of learning all the physics and optical properties behind that?
Or My Very Elderly Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles to know the planets instead of learning orbital dynamics and astrophysics?
Christ man, it’s a mnemonic device for elementary schoolers.
barsoap@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Those two things are memorisation tasks. Maths is not about memorisation.
You are not supposed to remember that the area of a triangle is
a * h / 2
, you’re supposed to understand why it’s the case. You’re supposed to be able to show that any triangle that can possibly exist is half the area of the rectangle it’s stuck in: Start with the trivial case (right-angled triangle), then move on to more complicated cases. If you’ve understood that once, there is no reason to remember anything because you can derive the formula at a moment’s notice.All maths can be understood and derived like that. The names of the colours, their ordering, the names of the planets and how they’re ordered, they’re arbitrary, they have no rhyme or reason, they need to be memorised if you want to recall them. Maths doesn’t, instead it dies when you apply memorisation.
Ein Anfänger (der) Gitarre Hat Elan. There, that’s the Guitar strings in German. Why do I know that? Because my music theory knowledge sucks. I can’t apply it, music is all vibes to me but I still need a way to match the strings to what the tuner is displaying. You should never learn music theory from me, just as you shouldn’t learn maths from a teacher who can’t prove
a * h / 2
, or thinks it’s unimportant whether you can prove it.SmartmanApps@programming.dev 1 day ago
It is for ROTE learners.
Yes you are. A lot of students get the wrong answer when they forget the half.
Constructivist learners can do so, ROTE learners it doesn’t matter. As long as they all know how to do Maths it doesn’t matter if they understand it or not.
No they’re not.
And if you haven’t understood it then there is a reason to remember it.
Students aren’t expected to be able to do that.
It can be by Constructivist learners, not ROTE learners.
No they’re not. Colours are in spectrum order, the planets are in order from the sun.
A very substantial chunk of the population does just fine with having memorised Maths.
AbidanYre@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
What fundamental property of the universe says that
6 + 4 / 2 is 8 instead of 5?
SmartmanApps@programming.dev 1 day ago
The fundamental property of Maths that you have to solve binary operators before unary operators or you end up with wrong answers.
AbidanYre@lemmy.world 1 day ago
But +, -, *, and / are all binary operators?
As far as I know, the only reason multiplication and division come first is that we’ve all agreed to it. But it can’t be derived in a vacuum as he contends it should be.
barsoap@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Nothing. And that’s why people don’t write equations like that: You either see
or
If you wrote
6 + 4 / 2
in a paper you’d get reviewers complaining that it’s ambiguous, if you want it to be on one line write(6+4) / 2
or6 + (4/2)
or6 + ⁴⁄₂
or even0.5 (6 + 2)
Working mathematicians never came up with PEMDAS, which disambiguates it without parenthesis, US teachers did. Noone else does it that way because it does not, in the slightest, aid readability.SmartmanApps@programming.dev 1 day ago
Says someone who clearly hasn’t looked in any Maths textbooks
Only if their Maths was very poor. #MathsIsNeverAmbiguous
Yes they did.
It was never ambiguous to begin with.
Says someone who has never looked in a non-U.S. Maths textbook - BIDMAS, BODMAS, BEDMAS, all textbooks have one variation or another.