Why call it a "zero math introduction" to a math topic? Kind of twists my guts a bit to read that. Seems to suggest some of a wannabe or love-hate relationship with math that you don't want to know any math but you find this math topic interesting?
Articles such as this one are a great resource to help what would be a mindless regurgitator actually understand what the whole point of an MCMC method is for. The 'why' to the 'what' essentially. And you don't need math to explain that.
There's an argument that you need math to explain it because it is math -- just not what we're taught to think of as "math".
One of my gripes with the current education system is that it makes it hard to recognize when math appears in situations not explicitly involving numbers, equations, and matrices.
Sounds like circular reasoning. There's an argument you need logic, because math is logic.
Math is confused with arithmetic, which is one tiny subset of math, and notation, which isn't math at all but is merely a tool mathematicians use to communicate more clearly because some concepts are too bulky when you attempt to express them using words. The essence of math is careful reasoning, following step-by-step processes to derive new truths from existing ones. If you do that, you're doing math, and if you do it without arithmetic or notation, people will say you're doing math without math.
> There's an argument that you need math to explain it because it is math
* More specifically, it's a mathematical idea, so, in order to explain it, it would be impossible not to use other mathematical ideas. These other ideas exist throughout the article and are [incorrectly] separated from what the average person thinks when they hear "math" but it's math, nonetheless. For instance, the many graphs throughout the article should be recognized as math.
So I guess that is not only in math, but in the entire corpus of knowledge, our system makes us prepared for grading tests, not for applying the knowledge.
As for "intuition", I usually seek refuge in Jeff Raskin's theorem "intuitive = familiar" - i.e. you don't lose the content of a statement made using the word intuition if you replaced it with the word familiar .. but now suddenly it is less "mystical" and clearer. Plus it points. To the subjectivity of intuition. - that what is familiar to one may not be familiar to another and so there are different "intuitive" explanations.
So "intuitive understanding of topic" = "understanding a topic based on what you're already familiar with". Explains why quantum mechanics doesn't feel "intuitive". There is nothing in our experience that makes the phenomena "familiar" to us.