Math with Bad Drawings

I think this article blows past several important points – perhaps unknowingly.

1. Sure, tic-tac-toe is a fantastic game for someone who needs to learn the "rewards of thinking ahead and taking the opponent’s strategy into account". Game enthusiasts (or indeed anyone above the age of 12) are very unlikely to need this lesson.

1> However, there is an interesting variant of tic-tac-toe[1] so disregarding the game completely isn't fair either.

2. People don't dislike Monopoly because it has dice. Risk has dice, and is incredibly popular. People dislike Monopoly because it is designed to be a game that is not fun to play for all but one player.

2> The game was designed as an anti-capitalist, anti-monopolist lesson.[2] When the rules are set up just right, only one person will be the winner and the other people will spiral into a negative feedback loop and quickly run out of all their money. That's the entire premise of the game: if you have a lot of money you can easily get more. Of course a game which is designed to distress 3/4 people playing in a session is not going to be very highly rated.

That said, I do think there is one popular game that gets very little respect from (at least western) game enthusiasts: go[3]!

Probably known in these circles as "the game computers can't yet beat top humans in" it's an abstract strategy game for two players (like chess) – with incredibly simple rules. You can learn the rules in a few minutes (literally) but it will take you weeks…

I meant "Formalization" in the larger sense of the word.

The Definition/Theorem/Proof (DTP) emphasis (to the exclusion of everything else) for axiomatization in mathematics arose in the late-19th century and solidified in the 20th century. Prior to this, while mathematicians always practiced rigour, they valued insight/intuition more for understanding.

An attempt was made to teach "Modern Math" in a "New Math" manner which though withdrawn, has left its detrimental mark on mathematics education to this day. See the "Reception" and "Legacy" sections at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math

Excerpts:

Physicist Richard Feynman argued, "first there must be freedom of thought; second, we do not want to teach just words; and third, subjects should not be introduced without explaining the purpose or reason, or without giving any way in which the material could be really used to discover something interesting. I don't think it is worthwhile teaching such material."

In a 1971 article, mathematician René Thom rejected the New Math as "a test of memory that poisons intelligence" because of its complete neglect of intuition.

Mathematician and historian of mathematics Morris Kline observed that it was "practically impossible" to learn new mathematical creations without first understanding the old ones, and that "abstraction is not the first stage, but the last stage, in a mathematical development."

Mathematician and author George F. Simmons wrote in the algebra section of his…

The difference is that we know there's something better than Java, C#, or C++ this time around. We have Typescript, Flow, Elm, Purescript, Haskell, Rust, OCaml, Idris, F*, Nim, Crystal, and more. Yes, some lessons have been forgotten that will have to be relearned, but on the whole we are improving. It's like how Andrew Whiles says[0] on how it's important to be forgetful to be a good mathematician:

> It goes like this. You try one strategy on a problem. It fails. You retreat, dispirited. Later, having forgotten your bitter defeat, you try the same strategy again. Perhaps the process repeats. But eventually—again, thanks to your forgetfulness—you commit a slight error, a tiny deviation from the path you’ve tried several times. And suddenly, you succeed.

I think we're a bit better than that, but it pays to remember it the next time you see the young whippersnappers publishing an NPM package doing the same thing you did years ago and deemed to be a failure. By all means, share the war stories with them - it's important we get better at appreciating history, but do it from a position of encouragement. They may yet succeed where you failed. :)

- [0]: https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2017/09/20/the-state-of-being-stuck/

http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/

Assuming you're specifically demanding stick figures doing math. It tends towards middle school level math and light comedy. The mystery of "point nine repeating" which was pretty interesting in 7th grade, and a skit along the lines of four technical professions try to split the check at a restaurant.

If someone knows of higher level stick figure math (aside from the linked AES discussion) that would be interesting.

Theoretically there are probably startup ideas around stick figure presentation online (a blogging / image service oriented strictly around sequential stick figures and comics?) or maybe in the infrastructure of something not as formalized and boring as visio but a little more cleaned up than a phone camera shot. Or an online service dedicated to cleaning up phone camera pics WRT hand drawings maybe even with OCR.

"Why are mathematicians so bad at arithmetic? (2017)" at https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2017/01/11/why-are-mathematicians-so-bad-at-arithmetic/ ("It’s a running joke among mathematicians that they’re bad with numbers." and "I’ve heard mathematicians lament that their ability with arithmetic peaked sometime in grade school.") with 124 HN comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30190338

Bear in mind this part:

"Now, are mathematicians actually that bad at arithmetic? Compared to engineers and accountants, perhaps. Compared to the average person on the street, of course not. The “bad at arithmetic” thing is probably overplayed."

Here are some relatively lesser known blogs that I can recommend, apart from the usual suspects (worrydream, John Baez etc.)

https://jeremykun.com

http://colah.github.io

https://mathwithbaddrawings.com

https://www.allendowney.com/blog/

And yeah I finally decided to inject some character into my personal website and spent a couple of days wrangling with css and made this --- http://linkdot.link . Not much content really though and it is mostly probability puzzles that I solve every now and then.

Edit: Formatting