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submitted 2 days ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to c/science_memes@mander.xyz

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[-] affiliate@lemmy.world 98 points 1 day ago

i think that if more people were exposed to advanced math there would be a reactionary trend of people going around and asking mathematicians “what is a number?”

[-] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 10 points 21 hours ago

I believe that's what happens anytime they say that we probably shouldn't focus on memorizing a multiplication table, or try to teach anything in a way that puts more focus on understanding how numbers work than on symbolic memorization.
And that's like... Elementary school.

[-] GorGor@startrek.website 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

The whole new math everyone was complaining about is trying to do this. Granted teachers are human and flawed so sometimes it has not been implemented well, but it is aimed in the right direction.

I am absolutely going to start responding to questions / statements about gender with this concept though.

"There are only two genders"

"Yeah, and there are only 3 states of matter! These woke scientists with their DEI alphabet soup of mattet B-E Condensates, and QSL, and DEGERATE MATTER! Its sick I tell you"

[-] dandelion 31 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

sort of like the reactionary trend of pulling your kids out of school because Common Core has changed how math is taught so critical thinking and conceptual understanding is incorporated, rather than teaching math by rote memorization?

[-] Droggelbecher@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

I'm shocked that the US only adopted this in 2009. I'm pretty sure my mum, who went to primary school in the 70s, recognized number lines when I was taught to use them on 2005ish. I'm having a hard time imagining how else you'd explain it.

[-] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 3 points 19 hours ago

First you make them memorize single digit subtraction X - Y where X >= Y. Then you extend that to small double digit numbers.
Then you teach "borrowing". 351-213. Subtract the 1s column. Can't take 3 from 1, so borrow 10 from the 5 in the 10s column, making 11 in the 1s column and 4 in the 10s.

Definitely more clear, right?

[-] dandelion 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

look, we work very hard on being reactionary here in the U.S., we're a world leader in reactionary politics, and not teaching math well is crucial to keeping a vibrant ~~slave~~ worker population, otherwise they might start, you know, thinking for themselves

[-] homura1650@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

I was going to make a comment about surreal numbers not being numbers. But I did a bit of fact checking and it looks like all of the values I was objecting to are not considered surreal numbers, but rather pseudo numbers.

I find this outrageous. Why can't ↑ be a number? What even is a number that would exclude it and leave in all of your so-called numbers?

[-] Inucune@lemmy.world 2 points 19 hours ago

Axioms. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_axioms

[-] homura1650@lemmy.world 1 points 13 hours ago

Where in those axioms does it say that ↑ = {0|∗} = {0 | {0|0} } is not a number? No where, that's where!

The actual reason that ↑ is simply that it is too ill behaved. The stuff I thought were the "numbers" of combinatorical game are actually just called Conway games. Conway numbers are defined very almost identically to Conway games, but with an added constraint that makes them a much better behaved subset of Conway games.

I suppose you could call this an axiom of combinatorical game theory; but at that point you are essentially just calling every definition an axiom.