Learn your maths

TED videos are reallly sick, my philosophy teacher used to show us some of the best of these videos. It's really nice to watch them and we learn a lot from these.
 
Watching this while studying calc. Lulz. But really, a lot of what we learn is mindless. He makes a god point. People argue that computers are just pushing buttons, but half the time people are just doing the same thing with their pencils. Most people probably don't understand why you can integrate to find volumes of solids, or other math things. They just know that if you do that, you get the answer.

And I have this chem class where I do a lot of analytical tests, including statistical analysis of chemical samples. I have to do all these dumb statistics tests by hand, but in a job I'd just input my data and out comes confidence intervals and outlier data and all this other stuff I'd want. I'm trying to figure out how to make scripts or equations r whatever for Numbers so could just apply these things to a set of data.
 
agreed, doing calculations is like putting screws into a plank using a handheld screwdriver instead of a drill, sure its a good thing to know how to do but if we can make it easier and do bigger projects, why wouldnt we use it.
 
Yes, giving reason adds perspective to a math problem that allows you to fully understand its parts and it's processes. Thank you common sense.
 
Hahah I totally agree with everything he says

you have to know though the guy presenting is Conrad Wolfram, owner of the company that made Wolfram Mathmatica, a computer software system that does gnarly math calculations hahah. So this whole thing is really just a sales pitch.
 
the reason they teach you "school math" is because they want you to learn how to learn a certain way.

In civil engineering you have to take tons of math, and in all of my upper level elective, i only had to integrate once...and it was part of a really tough test question.

they put you through the trials so that when you graduate, you have a firm grasp of how to learn a certain way, and how to approach problems a certain way.

and it works...there is a reason that buisness companies will hire an engineer with good people/buisness skills over a buisness guy with the same skill set, but more training in the field.
 
It is all trivial bro. There is no reason to do that, all your doing is plugging numbers into an equation, manipulating an equation so that you solve for whatever variable you want, or deriving variables from given information using a formula. Which btw can be very hard, not trying argue that. However all of this can be done in seconds with 100% accuracy using a computer, what is the point of showing pages of work showing how units cancel and how you got x by itself when you can skip the crap and get the value just by pushing a few buttons.
I mean I suppose you can argue that you need to know these steps in order to analyze the data your given, but idk I am not an engineering major. But what I will say for chemistry half of the shit I do I really have no idea why i am doing it when in any real world setting I would never do it using the methods I have to on an exam. So instead of focusing on the theory behind what is being done, I am just trying to get an answer that I really don't know what it is used for.

 
That being said I think for all math heavy disciples, engineering, physics,etc that you really should learn how the computation works, as a lot of those disciplines progress through understanding those very concepts and coming up with new formulas.
 
I dont really think this is valid. I believe he also addresses this argument in his talk...

I have no fucking clue how a car works, but i can still drive it. I dont know how computers work but i can still use them. Obviously, having a basic understanding is important, but we have reached the point where we don't need to waste time going through the mechanical process of calculating problems. Computers are much, much better than humans at that sort of stuff... whereas people are far better at the creative side of things and can actually apply the math to the real world...

Why waste time and bore students with things that they don't need to do/can be done much more efficiently by a machine?

Embrace the singularity.
 


for example, when analyzing where a hydraulic jump will occur in a given open channel of water, there are sooooo many variables and sub-equations that must first be manipulated. You need to understand the math behind the equations so that you can understand how certain adjustments, should affect the final output.

Another example would be one of the tests i took in one of my electives. i hadnt done a dericative or integration in 2+years, but on the test we were given a problem(most engineering problems are "real world") were the way we were taught to do that kind of problem didnt work. so we had to manipulate some equations, by integrating to solve the problem in a new way that hadnt been taught to us. if we had not learned how to look at problems and analyze them the way that was engrained into us, we would have been screwed.

Computers are awsome cause they itterate, and model super quickly. Other than that, i can do it almost as fast with my calc. You have to know what your plugging in and how it works if you are going to be a leader in a field. Situations pop up all the time where a project will be done in such a way that has never been done before, so you are creating all your analytic equations from scratch, and you better be damn sure you are modeling it correctly or people will die.

thats the difference between a engineers,docters and the rest of the work force. if we fuck up, and it can be a tiny fuck up, people die.
 
all that said, derivations of equations are pretty fucking gay. If you need to modify the "model equation" later on, they are useful, but the vast majority of the time, when a derivation of an equation came up, i stopped paying attention.
 
Quoting californiagrown from Feb 21 2011 11:40:35:
pretty fucking gayQuoting californiagrown from Feb 21 2011 11:40:35:
pretty fucking gayQuoting californiagrown from Feb 21 2011 11:40:35:
pretty fucking gayQuoting californiagrown from Feb 21 2011 11:40:35:
pretty fucking gayQuoting californiagrown from Feb 21 2011 11:40:35:
pretty fucking gayQuoting californiagrown from Feb 21 2011 11:40:35:
pretty fucking gay

No, it's not.
 
lol i ain't even mad tho. i was laughing when i made that poast why ya'll think i mad all the time? You can tell when i get really mad.
 
not fun, would be a start. Distasteful, unpleasant, unreasonable, useless, stupid, abysmal, woe-inspiring, anguish, painful, etc.
all things that gay aren't, and now you see why I object.
 
last I checked, you can go to wolframalpha.com for free.

It is in his best interest to make sure we have a strong field of educated math students. But, he's not slinging a product; if he's selling anything it's the importance of math.
 
true, but wolfram mathematica offers a shitload of software for free, ie. wolfram alpha, so i think it's more of a "view" on things instead of a simple sales pitch .....
+ he didn't mention specific software, i myself am currently working with Mathlab and got renewed respect for the reason why i need to learn to use math software .....
 
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Quoting THE BRO HIS MAD from Today:

IS emad bro ?

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Quoting THE BRO HIS MAD from Today:

Wiimad bro

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well, he's mad...
 
Hahah thats wolfram alpha. Not even nearly as powerful as the product it is based upon (Mathematica) haha I agree with what he is saying though
 
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