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Comment by sn41 | Hacker News Reader

A quote by the founding father of modern electrical engineering, and the formulator of the current version of Maxwell's equations, Oliver Heaviside:

(Read the entire article. It's hilarious, and surprising that Nature decided to publish it.)

"Euclid is the worst. It is shocking that young people should be addling their brains over mere logical subtleties, .... I hold the view that it is essentially an experimental science, like any other, and should be taught observationally, descriptively and experimentally." - Oliver Heaviside, "The teaching of mathematics", Nature 62, pp 548-549, 1900. [1]

[1] https://ia600708.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/22...

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Real World intuition is a habit one needs to abstain from to be able to be creative in the field of higher level mathematics. I have a bad feeling that also modern physics who has been pretty much stale since the early twentieth century is not due to lack of intuition but due to lack of mathematical models.

As for Heaviside he was self taught, an engineer in spirit rather than a mathematician. In a more modern mathematical perspective, not derived by intuition, Maxwell equations are just one very simple equation in Clifford algebric spaces. This formulation will not prevail since the engineering (intutitive + sleigh of hands) approach has dominated instant gratification higher educational level curricula.

I am not saying that what I am doing is different, I am from an engineer background also.

But having had that mindset, I eventually met mathematical minds and was humbled by their vastly different approach. This approach is not for everybody though, the yellow books are difficult to parse. Having said that I find that the mathematical mathematics approach is applicable in all of engineering whereas the engineering mathematics approach is not applicable in all of math.

My grandfather counted in threes for his entire life because working in the stock yards of Omaha the cows came down the schute in threes. The application of such math fed him until he died at the age of 85. I'm sure he never heard of an algebraic space, Clifford's or anyome else's.

What's your point?

Teach people the kind of math that feeds them. The kind they can hack their way out of a box with. Teach them math which like a good screwdriver can be a lever and a hammer too when necessary.

But teaching every kid as if the best thing school can do for them is to guide them to the door of calculus through which they will pass unto untold collegiate adventures has been a disaster and should stop.

You will still have your math majors. The school system should make an effort to conduct those kids towards that end but that should cease to be the emphasis. The school of wizarding has a way of finding its own and we should be focused on more people getting more use out of the math they do learn.

New intuition and abstraction are what allows us to make progress where we previously were stuck.

Leaving behind real world intuition doesn’t mean that math can’t be experimental in nature. The mathematical proof is itself experiential, is it not?

I wouldn’t mind if math education followed science: split up the course between lecture and lab!

Nice article from Oliver Heaviside. Essentially, it comes down to the realisation that experimenting with mathematics holds as much virtue as reason with logic.

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