Math Joke w/ Question
I'm curious how many of my math teacher friends feel that this joke is true. I'm on the fence. I think it could easily be argued that at the lower levels especially, we teach the illusion of hard-core, universal facts. Or we could just say that all facts are relative.
posted by Skye Xyan @ 9:43 AM
1 Comments:
At Sunday, May 31, 2009 12:29:00 PM,
Dirk Awesome said…
I think that we definitely impart "perfect knowledge" at the lower levels, largely because we make the rules. Telling someone that the quadratic equation is a way to get roots is similar to telling someone that "three strikes and you are out in baseball."
Notice that I didn't write "universal," though. In fact, we definitely do NOT do that. The "facts" "1+1=2" and "(a+b)^2 is not a^2+b^2" are actually false in fields of characteristic two, and they therefore cannot be universal in the strongest sense of the word.
So, I suppose that I don't agree with it - it is not "universal," and it is a cheap sort of "perfect knowledge."
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