
Mathematics without history is soulless - endswapper
https://hackernoon.com/mathematics-without-history-is-soulless-978436602fa4
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ColinWright
This was submitted by the author a few days ago, but it gained no upvotes, and
only one comment. The comment was mine, and I repeat it here. The "you" in
this comment is the author:

 _On this I beg to differ. Or at least, you are making a sweeping
generalisation. Not everyone thinks and feels as you do._

 _For me, being given "historical context" and having to understand where
these things came from, or why they were interesting, or how they were
developed, or who did them, was tedious agony, and I hated it with a passion
that's hard to describe._

 _I understand that for some people it brings mathematics to life, for others,
like me, it kills it. Please don 't think everyone is like you._

~~~
endswapper
The author's statements are reasonable. I am surprised by your comment as well
as the need to repost it.

He's taking the time to remind us of the richness beyond the technical
understanding of mathematics. I think this is a good reminder, in particular,
for a technically proficient audience that may spend the majority of their
time on technical matters.

Nowhere did he say that we should be historians or encyclopedias of/for
mathematics.

At worst, his point stimulates an additional portion of our brains and may
make mathematics more accessible to some.

The title might be hyperbolic, but it's effective.

~~~
ColinWright
I am surprised at your surprise. All I'm saying is that for me, what the
author proposes would have been strongly counter-productive. I'm sure I'm not
alone in this. I'm sure some students would benefit, I'm sure others, equally,
would not.

I just wanted to be sure that the complementary point of view was expressed,
especially since it affects me personally.

    
    
        The title might be hyperbolic,
        but it's effective.
    

Actually, I disagree with the title. Mathematics has a life and soul of its
own separately and independently of its history. The real problem is that in
school one doesn't actually study mathematics anyway, one mostly does
arithmetic and manipulation. Perhaps for many students the problem lies not in
understanding the history, but in not doing mathematics to start with.

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nine_k
I think it's often useful to provide the mathematics first, then add history
when / if it's interesting.

Same applies to physics, imho. There's a lot of interesting historical
development behind most topics, but physics is complicated enough as it is,
and understanding the current state first is important if you ever hope to
understand how it developed historically.

------
nikofeyn
"mathematics without context is soulless" is my preferred sentiment.

~~~
dTal
Exactly.

It's a false dichotomy between "mathematics, unadorned" and "the history of
math". Philosophy is an example of a subject at the other end of the spectrum,
taught almost entirely through history, yielding a strangely disjointed and
unstructured experience: "Plato thought we all live in a cave. Descartes
thought he might be a brain in a vat. Sarte claimed God was dead. etc..."
Meanwhile the student is wondering what on earth all these looney toons have
to do with each other and why she should care, because the larger framework is
neglected and discredited ideas aren't pruned.

I think the correct approach is to teach structure first,
justification/usefulness second, and history a distant third - best reserved
for explaining awkward but hard-to-change inconsistencies (such as the use of
pi instead of tau as the circle constant). I would also submit that if the
justification for some aspect of a subject is _only_ historical, it should
probably be dropped...

