The Joy of x: A Guided Tour of Math

[@justinprice6514]

Steven Strogatz is amazing. Thank you for sharing!

[@hmweitz]

I found this an elegant and enlightening talk. I'd love to hear from the one person (as of now) who voted thumbs-down about why he/she did so. Also, Prof. Strogatz attributes anti-intellectualism as a problem with attitudes toward math. I think that's true but maybe not the whole answer. By way of counter-example I point to a teaching colleague of mine who can unpack a stanza of The Iliad better than most people and he hates math, though he's certainly not anti-intellectual. Snow's two cultures live on.

[@earthbjornnahkaimurrao9542]

"...peculiar kind of bathtub that you will never encounter in the real world..." - if you mean a bathtub with separate taps for hot and cold water I think they are common in the UK

[@Hythloday71]

This guy, I like him don't get me wrong, I like the lecture, but it's an interest, it's my way; I can't help but notice the glaring way he contradicts himself. Earlier in the lecture he says "you need to learn it just one way" whilst throughout the talk he places emphasis on the fact that there are many ways to think about a problem. Then at the end of the lecture laments that teachers don't understand the deep principles involved and so teach rote "cook book" solutions and this is what the students learn and don't know how to think about problems. To accept that there are different ways to view a problem, to understand thoroughly particular presentations of a problem - IMO involves learning several approaches to a problem. It can be expected that a student will settle down and favour a particular approach. But there is very definitely value in examining other approaches. I think, an algorithm is useful to de-stress a student as often will be needed before moving onto such investigations.

[@PatrickAndrewsMacphee]

Heroic. Mr Johnson deserves a huge vote of thanks.

[@AutodidacticPhd]

There are a lot of questions about pedagogy near the end, but most of the responses seem to be pretty standard. Even when faced with "why other cultures seem to do better" the options he lists are all very typical... which is frustrating because he came so close to what I think is the right answer earlier in the talk. The biggest problem in education is that our methods of measuring student progress assume perfection. It's our baseline, and the only way a student can vary is down. We don't measure how smart students are, or how well they do, or what they know. We measure how stuoid they are, how incompetent. The only thing our system tells a student is their failures. Success is assumed. Even a student's practice is graded, and even their first try is about how bad they are. THAT is the porblem. That's why teaching multiple way of doing something seems like a bad idea. In our system, it doesn't give them many paths to a single success, but many opportunities to feel stupid at something that they can do. How can his, "it depends on the student" find a place in a system that so fundamentally refuses a safe space for failure? By the time the teacher knows what doesn't work, the student who didn''t get their first method is dispondent and the student who did is ready to move on.

[@diegoag85]

the easiest solution is to say that 1,5 baths will be filled in 30 min! and 30/1,5 = 20 min/bath