Timeline for What should we teach to liberal arts students who will take only one math course?
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
6 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Apr 25, 2011 at 14:54 | comment | added | Thierry Zell | Let's not knock naive set theory. I think that if you could get liberal arts students to really understand intersections, unions, distributivity and de Morgan's laws, it could be time well spent. Being able to systematically reason about this can really be enlightening, and a valuable skill for, say, a future lawyer. | |
| Jun 22, 2010 at 20:14 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by S. Carnahan♦ | ||
| Jun 21, 2010 at 4:09 | comment | added | Victor Protsak | Michael's roommate story somehow reminds me of the following student comment on a Linear Algebra course I taught: "More time should have been spent on solving systems of linear equations, because obviously, that is the only useful part" (I think we only spent 3 weeks on them). Back to set theory: N.Ya.Vilenkin's "Stories about sets" (in Russian) is an exciting book that is perfect for high school students. | |
| Jun 19, 2010 at 12:52 | comment | added | Michael Hardy | When I was in 12th grade a classmate saw me reading a thin book (maybe 80 pages) about set theory and asked me how anyone could possibly write a book that long about set theory. Everyone had been taught in 7th grade that set theory consists of understanding what unions and intersections are, and that it takes about two minutes to learn. | |
| Jun 19, 2010 at 9:50 | comment | added | Harry Gindi | Basic set theory is one of the dryest areas of mathematics. It's all very formal, and I don't really see how you can inspire people with it. There is a lot of very deep set theory as well, but you wouldn't get into it, and you'd lose all interest far before you got to anything resembling something interesting. | |
| Jun 19, 2010 at 8:48 | history | answered | bc919 | CC BY-SA 2.5 |