[4086] in Depressing_Thoughts
Re: Math proofs are bogus!
danb@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (danb@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Mon Oct 25 11:37:30 1993
ok.
since you're busy attacking something i intend to spend a significant portion
of at least the next 7 years, and probably more than that doing:
proof is a great technique for establishing that you really understand the
concepts that you're studying. mathematical maturity may not seem like a
skill you're going to use for the rest of your life. that's probably even
in general true.
BUT, since you're obviously taking a class which is attempting to teach you
a new way of understanding how numbers/shapes/concepts interact, proof is the
best-known way of forcing you to explore how these new ideas interface with
each other, such as the special cases or loopholes. this can be where great
breakthroughs happen.
this term i'm grading 18.04 (a class i heartily recommend avoiding, if you can).
one of my BIGGEST complaints so far has been the students who gratuitously
throw maple plots at me, expecting that i'm going to bow down before their
superior abilities as a technical tool user. no, i don't know how to use any
of these programs (and probably should learn). but on the other hand, i can
explain the significant features of the graphs that they're drawing much more
competently than they seem to.
so this is my general flame about assaulting mathematical maturity and proof as
being irrelevant. then again, i feel much the same when my math classes just
assume that if i'm told to write 400 lines of c code that, after i'm finished
with them, i'll understand the concepts better. (in reality, i'll just mostly
re-determine that i don't want to program for the rest of my life.)
i'm sorry that you're unhappy about proof. but some of us really get a great
deal out of it.
