Due Sunday, Sunday, April 11 at 11:59pm
Contents
Background
Gracie’s questions
Gracie Cunningham is a student who went viral on Twitter a few months ago when someone tweeted her Tik Tok and said, “this is the dumbest video ive ever seen.” (That person’s Twitter account has since been suspended btw.)
After catching a lot of hate on Twitter, Gracie made a follow-up video and tweeted it herself. (I like both videos but I think I prefer the first one tbh.)
Alongside all the critical comments calling her dumb, Gracie got a huge outpouring of support from mathematicians, physicists, philosophers, and teachers, who loved her videos. Like, really, really loved them.
Dr. Cheng’s answers
Eugenia Cheng is a mathematician who is very good at explaining math to non-mathematicians. She’s published a few popular books about math for a general audience and is very active on Twitter. She’s even appeared on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert!
Gracie’s questions are mostly about the history and philosophy of math (which is a real academic discipline that people can study and get PhD’s in!). Some of her questions have concrete answers and some of her questions just lead to more questions. When Dr. Cheng saw Gracie’s videos and the critical comments on them, she tried answering Gracie’s questions one-by-one on her blog.
Assignment instructions
None of us are experts in the history of math or in the philosophy of math (unless there’s something you’re not telling us in your OpenLab introduction post from last week!). But we all have studied math and encountered math in some form in our day-to-day lives…which means that we’ve all spent time thinking about math, so we can ask questions about it.
For this week’s assignment, think about math in the big picture of the human experience, not just the math you see in your math classes.
- Watch both of Gracie’s videos above and read Eugenia Cheng’s blog post.
- Choose one of the following prompts:
- What are you curious about? Have you ever had any questions like “Is math real?” or like Gracie’s questions that you’ve thought about before? What is one of your questions and what have your thoughts been about it? Was there something in particular that made you have question? Was there something that changed your mind about how you think about it? Do you have any possible answers for your question, even if they contradict each other?
- Which of Dr. Cheng’s answers is the most interesting to you? Why? Did you agree with everything she said or do you have a different idea? How would you have answered this question?
- Imagine Gracie is your friend. What would your answers to her questions be? Which of her questions would you ask her more questions about? What would you ask her? How would you engage with her ideas in a supportive way?
- What’s something mathematical that you have encountered in your life that had nothing to do with the math you learned in school? Was there a problem you had to solve on your own? Did you have to look up how to solve it or did you figure out a way to solve it yourself? How do you know what you did counts as math instead of as something that’s not math?
- Look up the history of a mathematical fact, formula, or idea. What problem were people trying to solve when they discovered it? How did it solve the problem for them? How did they know they were right and how did they use it? What is the story of this fact, formula, or idea? (I’m not sure how reliable it is, but the website the Story of Mathematics might be a good place to start).
- Make your own video (on Tik Tok or anywhere else that’s public) asking your own questions about the history and philosophy of math.
- In a comment below, respond to the prompt you chose in at least 5 sentences. Make sure to tell us which prompt you chose so we know what you’re responding to! If you are making your own video, include a link to it in your comment.
You will receive participation credit for your comment.
If you want to write more than a few sentences, you are certainly allowed to! If your response is too long for a comment, you may submit your own OpenLab post; comment here with a link to your post so we can find it later.
I have been wondering all my life about how geniuses like Einstein etc came about their findings. like how could he envision what he was talking about in other to further his investigations or add to the previous findings or dispute them? I am a thinker myself but what I think about has been done before or is based on something I have seen or experienced so this brings me confusion when I have to believe someone just came with some formular just by observing the occurrence of something and I know one may say they saw it first but I can’t believe they saw everything and if they didn’t why not ?. This doesn’t seem real to me and I have begun to believe some people were born with such knowledge for example there are some formulas in physics that are universally true but can’t be explained by the people who made them. When it comes to knowledge I believe there are two types innate and learned. To be able to distingue and use both types is called wisdom and the reason I say this is because wisdom is knowing something is right and explaining it to understanding without stating found facts or prior knowledge in my opinion.
I’ve had similar questions on the discovery of math because i believed most mathematical discoveries were made from important needs such as calculus being instrumental in trebuchet. But i never thought about how algebra is necessary because of our constant use of it in daily life. Majoring in electrical engineering showed me the importance of math but i haven’t seen an importance of calculus yet in daily life. I understand its importance but not in regards to my daily life which is a major question for me. I haven’t been able to think of any daily calculus uses.
The most interesting answer of dr. Chengs is the first one about formulas. I too am often curious about why things happen the way they do or just happen in general. I found this to be very interesting because I now understand more about formulas and the way Dr. Chen’s explains is so clear and makes so much sense. I always understood formulas well but from Dr. Chengs answer it explains how formulas came about and that being to spot patterns and seeing things in common.
I would not say the same phase as “is math real” but more of Why and How did these things come to be. Just like Gracie ask in both videos saying Why would you need to something like Y=mx+b during a time where that is not things to be searching for. Or how Isaac Newton Invent Calculus to then use to explain the motion of planets. These were somethings that I question why Focus on these things so much when the use of it won’t have much of affect in the present. However the counter statement to all of this can be Why ask these questions but also that is the Whole idea of mathematicians, physicist and more because they aim for things that beyond our level of understanding to further increase that understanding. They question everything around them which them leads to trying to solve these questions. Which brings use back to why Isaac Newton Invented Calculus because he wanted to figure out why things moved, why things stopped or slow down, and are we moving and if so what about the stars. it may of not help then but what he sort out to do creating some base information to then build even further. that’s about it really its about why we ask questions which is just are curious.
For my own understanding about the phrase “is math real” I am more related to the questions from the tiktok that Gracie made. I was not always, but as needed, was curious as well how would anyone come up with any theories and find ways to prove them. How would they know that they are real and that these are actually the ones that are going to help to solve. Another factor would be to examine, is that why did they come up with mathematical theories? What was the push factor to create strategies, was is geometry to help an architect build? or was it a strategy to organize currency for example?
In some cases such as function of y=mx+b can be used to determine many things such as the height and speed of a plane, and the accuracy level of a building. These questions are all very interesting to keep in mind for a curious person.
Is math real? Like Gracie there was a time where I was asking myself do we really need to know a lot of math or just stick to the basics of math for everyday essentials like counting, adding, subtracting, dividing. In my opinion, I think we need math to at least precalculus for everyday essentials. I know that math helps us in our everyday lives from GPS to altitude, construction, and even bridges. At first, I was asking myself why do we need to find limits what were our purposes? Later than I realize in pre-calculus that it was just for us to know before going to calc 1 and 2 going up. One she was saying why y=mx+b is actually the basic of math to me, finding the slope of the line uses the formula y=mx+b. Not to judge I was in her shoes when I came to the US to middle school everything that I seen was different I didn’t quite understand like that but then I tried understanding what these equations like Y=mx+b means.
(I am responding to prompt 1.) One of the things I am curious about is how is math we typically learned in middle and high school implemented in real life situations? I always would wonder about mathematical concepts and why would we learn them if in real life situations outside of math we weren’t using them, it honestly felt pointless. One thing that defninitely changed my mind was in one of my engineering courses we needed to find the area of the top of a wire, and I never needed to find the area of a circle in real life until then. However, I still feel as though in our younger years we had more real life examples of what we were actually learning.