Timeline for How to present mathematics to non-mathematicians?
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
5 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 4, 2020 at 15:40 | comment | added | Steve Jessop | Prospective undergraduates are not equipped to understand the topology, but they understand stories with a beginning, middle, and end. He probably included informal definitions of "manifold" and "string theory", but I don't remember how he stated that. | |
| Jul 4, 2020 at 15:40 | comment | added | Steve Jessop | One of my undergraduate tutors had a great paragraph in his bio "explaining" part of his research without any details at all. Basically it ran: "I discovered the first examples of manifolds with certain properties. This remained completely useless for several years until some string theorists decided that those properties were interesting, and suddenly lots of physicists wanted to know about my manifolds. Eventually they decided the properties weren't interesting, so they didn't need manifolds with those properties, and that was the end of that"... | |
| Nov 22, 2012 at 20:37 | comment | added | Austin Mohr | If you start with the phrase "Rational Points on Atkin-Lehner Quotients of Shimura Curves" and remove all the words the medical student did not know, you are left with "Points on of Curves" - almost precisely what he echoed back to you. :) | |
| Aug 15, 2011 at 12:45 | comment | added | Asaf Karagila♦ | Pete, I somehow got to read this again. I can say that my reply to the medical student would have been to diminish him to a butcher or something similar. Being a jerk can be fun, especially when alcohol is involved! :-) | |
| Nov 30, 2010 at 19:43 | history | answered | Pete L. Clark | CC BY-SA 2.5 |