←back to thread

Everyone is capable of, and can benefit from, mathematical thinking

(www.quantamagazine.org)
669 points sonabinu | 1 comments | 21 Nov 24 01:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.272s | source
Show context
gsabo ◴[21 Nov 24 05:19 UTC] No.42201370[source]▶
I agree with the sentiment of this. I think our obsession with innate mathematical skill and genius is so detrimental to the growth mindset that you need to have in order to learn things.

I've been working a lot on my math skills lately (as an adult). A mindset I've had in the past is that "if it's hard, then that means you've hit your ceiling and you're wasting your time." But really, the opposite is true. If it's easy, then it means you already know this material, and you're wasting your time.

replies(18): >>42201667 #>>42201721 #>>42201729 #>>42201821 #>>42201915 #>>42202008 #>>42202194 #>>42202777 #>>42202780 #>>42202880 #>>42203292 #>>42203429 #>>42203649 #>>42204501 #>>42204671 #>>42206252 #>>42208029 #>>42219658 #
1. User23 ◴[21 Nov 24 14:35 UTC] No.42204671[source]▶
I grow increasingly convinced that the difference in “verbal” and “mathematical” intelligence is in many ways a matter of presentation.

While it’s indisputable that terse symbolic formalisms have great utility, one can capture all the same information verbally.

This is perhaps most evident in formal logic. It’s not hard to imagine a restricted formalized subset of natural language that is amenable to mechanical manipulation that is isomorphic to say modal logic.

And finally, for logic at least, there is something of a third way. Diagrammatic logical systems such as Existential Graphs capture the full power of propositional, predicate, and modal logic in a way that is neither verbal nor conventionally symbolic.