Orbital Path Of Asteroid Near Miss In 2002. Yah, That’s How Close We Came To Nuclear Winter And Possible

The Royal Institution: Eugenia Cheng — “How to Think Like a Mathematician”

could u imagine if ppl talked about catholicism the same way they talked about like… indigenous ppl’s religions….

I'm a physics major who works as a tutor with a bunch of math majors, and today I was explaining differentials to a student and I said to convert the dC/dt equation to one with differentials just multiply both sides by dt and that's the only difference and I could feel them all judging me hfgsgskdhdlhd trust me we know we are wrong but we are too lazy and dumb

Okay, okay, look, all is well.

Yeah mathematicians are gonna cringe a little when people say stuff like this because we know it’s not rigorous, but you know what else? We made that dy/dx notation look like fractions for a reason. Certainly what’s going on here is a little more subtle than division and multiplication and if you’re working with some really weird functions that subtlety could get you in trouble. But for most situations, you can treat that stuff like fractions, and we made the notation that way to highlight that fact and make the symbol manipulation more efficient.

We laid the complicated foundations with rigorous analysis so we would have a robust and efficient tool, and we made it user-friendly, and we gripe about its users using it the way we intended? That’s like complaining that I use my phone without understanding its circuitry or complaining that I eat pop tarts without understanding what’s in them. Those things are true, but my phone was designed to be used by someone who doesn’t understand or need to understand its circuitry and pop tarts were designed to be eaten by people who don’t understand or need to understand what’s in them. I know that someone understands my phone’s circuitry and someone knows what’s in pop tarts and I trust them.

You’re not lazy or dumb. Calculus, as mathematicians passed it off to engineers and scientists, was designed to be used by people who don’t understand or need to understand the rigorous analysis that holds it up. Engineers and scientists trust that we gave them a good tool that we built well, and they use it. It’s nice when they understand it more deeply and it serves them well but it’s not always necessary.

I’m not gonna stop joking about how silly treating dy/dx as a fraction is, because it certainly won’t fly in math circles where doing so might actually screw you over, but even more because that’s what everyone does. Every field cringes and giggles when the out-group uses their tools without deference and deep understanding, as is every field’s right, but it should never be taken too seriously, because guess what!

That’s the anthropocene, babey! That’s specialization of labor! We don’t all have time to understand everything, we just have to understand what we can and trust that someone else understands the rest! That’s science! That’s humanity! That’s beautiful! Joke about it all you want, it is a little weird, but anyone properly hating on it? Cut it out or I’ll cut you out and that’s that!

“Being curious is better than being smart. Being motivated and curious counts for more than being smart because it leads to action. Being smart will never deliver results on its own because it doesn’t get you to act. It is desire, not intelligence, that prompts behavior.”

— James Clear, Atomic Habits

School of Fish Inktober day 16

you must insist on being curious. curious is what we should be. ask questions, research, know. being ignorant is not cool or trendy. fill your brain with knowledge.