Fibonacci's Daughter: Math Tolerance

[banazir]

Just at that moment, Professor Pietro Baglioni looked forth from the window, and called loudly, in a tone of triumph mixed with horror, to the thunder-stricken man of science: "Rappaccini! Rappaccini! And is this the upshot of your experiment?"
    -"Rappacini's Daughter", Nathaniel Hawthorne

Comments

a couple of things

[prolog]

I couldn't care less whether we are in Arts and Sciences or Engineering.

I do. Engineering at the U of S required so many math and engineering courses that the students typically got two, maybe three half-courses in subjects other than those required by their degree.

To me, that's positively criminal.

Specialization is for graduate degrees. Undergraduate degrees are supposed to be about exploring many different ideas and disciplines. Outside of CS and math, I took astronomy, French, a number of English courses, economics, and music. I wish I had room for ancient Greek and history.

That's why I've always felt that putting CS in the Arts & Science college (or whatever the equivalent) is a good thing.

In my opinion as an educator, what we need to do is to condition students to be comfortable with fundamental theory.

Absolutely agreed.

Re: a couple of things

[gondhir]

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
-Robert A. Heinlein

*shouts comment to Witch-King*

[hfx_ben]

HeyYa -

Nice to see someone pushing LJ to the limits ... and I do mean "to the limits".

<==== thinks anything more than 3 screens high is too long ... and knows that TimbBL feels likewise

I conceptualized a variant of LJ that would support this sort of multi-threaded activity. When I find someone with seed capital who's willing to sign a standard non-disclosure agreement I'll spill my guts.

cheers
:-)

Hey, Ben!

[banazir]

Long time, no see!

I have been catching your wibblings on hfx_ben and gnodal, but havne't had time to reply. Good to hear from you!

My posts are fewer than 3 screens long on my 1600x1200 monitor. ;-)

Wot's TimbBL, precious?

Here's hoping you get your LJ variant idea funded! :-)

BTW, care to be friended to tanelos, my Nanowrimo LJ?

--
Banazir

Re: Hey, Ben!

[hfx_ben]

HeyYa Bill -

huh huh ... trust you to have a good programmer's monitor!
;-)

TimBL? Tim Berners Lee of W3C, u'course. "Back in the day" he was accessible by email. (In '95 he and I exchanged notes concerning a functionality I had been using in '89 ... something like "sticky notes" launched from a hyper-enabled page of text [I had been creating hyper-help using "Peabody".] ... this was pre-frames.)

My LJ variant ... funding ... gawd ... everyone is too busy for a new idea. Winners only listen to winners.

<=== not in "winner" mode at the moment

[gregbo]

I took 6.001, but it was a long time ago. The course has changed quite a bit since I took it in 1980. Mine was the last time that Unix Lisp and ALGOL were used. However, Abelson did cover the same types of principles that are used today (hierarchy, modularity, etc.).

[kakarigeiko]

Haven't had a chance to work with Carlos yet - he's doing more inference / machine learning stuff, I'm doing more security / general distributed algorithms stuff, so as yet there's no intersect. Maybe in the near future though!