Timeline for How to present mathematics to non-mathematicians?
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
4 events
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| Nov 25, 2010 at 2:05 | comment | added | Thierry Zell | @Andrej: I'm a big fan of math popularization, but it is notoriously difficult to do well; one might even argue that it's enlightened non-mathematicians who do it best, and the books in my library seem to agree. I think that asking a graduate student to summarize their research topic in a soundbite is quite unfair, and has nothing to do with popularizing math (though students should be warned that such requests tends to happen quite a bit during hiring season). | |
| Nov 24, 2010 at 12:02 | comment | added | Andrej Bauer | I think we need to distinguish between popularization of math and real math. Popularization of math is important there should be "soundbytes" that try to explain to ordinary people what math is. If you tell ordinary people "go read a book" they will just think you are an arrogant jerk (which you are if you say that). Of course, when it comes to real math the story is different. Math presented in papers, funding proposals and conferences should be done properly. | |
| Nov 24, 2010 at 10:07 | comment | added | Sonia Balagopalan | That said, I know exactly how you feel. I took a "generic skills" course called "Information, Communication, and Literacy". It was at around the same point (when we were asked to convert our research questions into soundbytes) that I finally quit. I'm going to suppress the rant and just suggest that you should stand up to this kind of twitterification. A cool thing to do would be to say "Go read a book" and suggest a reading list. | |
| Nov 24, 2010 at 10:03 | history | answered | Sonia Balagopalan | CC BY-SA 2.5 |