Timeline for Mathematical "urban legends"
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 4, 2011 at 20:48 | comment | added | Lennart Meier | Concerning quaternions, there is also a story, which has happend in Cambridge as my brother told me: A professor asks in a lecture: "Is here somebody who does not know everything about quaternions?" A single student raises slowly her hand. "What?? Then learn it until tomorrow!" - it goes without saying that there were students in the class who did not raise their hand and did not even know what quaternions are... | |
| Jan 27, 2011 at 21:16 | comment | added | Sean Tilson | Well, then it is true of at least two mathematicians and told by as many. | |
| Jan 27, 2011 at 18:10 | comment | added | Sam Nead | The second story is told, by Bus Jaco, about Bing. | |
| Jan 25, 2011 at 14:20 | comment | added | Sean Tilson | The story above takes place in the 1970's or earlier. | |
| Jan 25, 2011 at 10:09 | comment | added | Harry Altman | This story sounds strange to me because (at least the past few years, when I was there) the University of Chicago, SFAIK, doesn't have a straight-up linear algebra class for math majors. The easier stuff you're basically expected to just up, the harder stuff gets stuffed into the general "algebra" sequence. | |
| Jan 25, 2011 at 8:24 | comment | added | darij grinberg | In Germany many professors would be happy to get banned from teaching undergraduate courses (and behave accordingly). There used to be payment by number of students some years ago, but now it has been levelled, and teaching undergraduate courses has become nothing more than a chore people want to get rid of. | |
| Jan 25, 2011 at 7:01 | comment | added | Steve Huntsman | As an undergraduate I heard a secondhand story about a knot theorist teaching an introductory calculus class. The first question on the final was basic calculus; the rest involved knot theory. | |
| Jan 25, 2011 at 5:57 | comment | added | Mariano Suárez-Álvarez | Actually, that is not that bad of an idea! I have seen the face of my students when I tell them «you should go through your linear algebra notes to see how much of it carries over to the case of skew-fields» right before proceeding to pick a basis for an $\mathbb H$-module, say... | |
| Jan 25, 2011 at 5:52 | history | answered | Sean Tilson | CC BY-SA 2.5 |