Mr swordfish

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New math

I saw you brought up the "new math" on the 0.999... talk page. It's a fascinating topic, isn't it? It was probably doomed from the start, partly because it didn't take into account young children's limited capacity for abstraction at early stages of cognitive development, but maybe moreso because there weren't enough teachers who understood it, and because parents weren't capable of assisting their kids with it. That's my totally evidence-free speculation and take it for what it's worth.

But given the cultural context of the time, I think it's gone into the popular imagination as touchy-feely "soft" math, which is pretty much the opposite of what was intended, and that's fascinating too. --Trovatore (talk) 18:58, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

I had the "new math" at the time. The ideas were easy to understand for a six year old and I couldn't understand why the teachers seemed to have such a hard time understanding it. I still remember my first grade teacher reciting the difference between a number and a numeral as if she were a parrot who had no idea what the words she was saying meant.

Getting it at such an early age was probably the best thing that ever happened to me education-wise, and my career as a software developer at times seemed to be mostly just a simple application of the ideas of set theory I learned when I was in grade school. I don't have a cite for this, but it's not an accident that 15 to 20 years after the new math was introduced we saw an enormous explosion of computer development. Base 2, base 8, base 16? Not a problem if you learned it early.

The problem with introducing advanced mathematical concepts at that early as stage is that the parents and teachers don't understand it, and also that perhaps only a few of the students get it. Perhaps if the parents and teachers were more invested it would have caught on. I never had any musical or foreign language instruction as a child, and those neural pathways never developed so I'm hopeless as a musician or speaking a foreign language. Abstract math is similar - you need to get it early. Mr. Swordfish (talk) 23:14, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

I had New Math. I don't remember much, but I do remember the teacher not being able to articulate the concept of a set very well. According to her, you can have a set of an apple, an orange, and a dog, but not a set of three apples. In retrospect, it's a bit subtle -- a set of "types of fruit" can't have multiple apples, but a set of "individual pieces of fruit" certainly can.

I doubt that New Math was the right approach for elementary school. Yes, of course, to do "real" math you need to work with sets, but most of math through high school (including calculus) probably is better off without them. Closed and bounded is a good enough definition for compact for high school.... Premature abstraction is not necessarily a good thing.

Oh, yes, I got a BSc in math and a PhD in Comp Sci and have worked on the computer algebra system Macsyma/Maxima...., so it didn't cause too much damage. --Macrakis (talk) 18:11, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

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Education on the matter of aerodynamic lift

Hi Mr Swordfish. A couple of days ago I met Dr Graham Wild from the Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of New South Wales, Canberra campus. I discovered he has an intense interest in the science of aerodynamic lift and its place in education of engineers and scientists. (Wild's background is as a physicist.)

Wild has recently written an excellent summary of the background to the equal transit time theory. See ETT.

He has also written some other excellent papers on this subject. You might be interested in the following:

'Is that lift diagram correct? A visual study of flight education literature', Physics Education, 58. Wild G, 2023, [1]

'Misunderstanding Flight Part 1: A Century of Flight and Lift Education Literature', Education Sciences, 13, pp. 762 – 762. Wild G, 2023, [2]

'Misunderstanding Flight Part 2: Epistemology and the Philosophy of Science', Education Sciences, 13, pp. 836 – 836.  Wild G, 2023, [3]

His papers are available on open source and can be cited with appropriate attribution. I plan to use them in this way.

Cheers. Dolphin (t) 11:38, 29 November 2023 (UTC)

Interesting article. I was familiar with Misunderstanding Flight Part 1 and intended to chase down all the refs and read them, but I got distracted. Didn't know about Part 2.

As for the "On the Origins and Relevance of the Equal Transit Time Fallacy to Explain Lift" article, I have to disagree with his conclusions. The analogy between ETT and Newton's theory of gravity is one of the worst I've seen in recent memory. Newton's theory of gravity, along with all of classical physics (including basically all of aerodynamics) is still a coherent and correct theory. However, it is a model that is not applicable to things moving very fast or things that are very small. So in some instances a more complex model (i.e. relativity or quantum mechanics) must be used. That doesn't invalidate classical mechanics.

ETT, OTOH, is just plain wrong. It's not a theory in the sense that any serious engineer or physicist would use it to describe or predict lift. Nor have they in the past. It's not even like 2-D potential flow, which while having many flaws actually does a reasonable job of predicting lift in some circumstances. There's a big difference between a simplified or incomplete model and something that is demonstrably wrong and not based on any physical principle.

My take is that he gives ETT too much credence. His question "...does ETT belong in primary or secondary education?" should receive a resounding "no" other than perhaps to mention in passing that many people have used this incorrect explanation and that you may see it in older materials. Mr. Swordfish (talk) 15:23, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

Enquiry on Removal of 'Induced Demand' Entry from Transportation Misconceptions

Hey. From my research and understanding, adding more lanes for motor traffic doesn't provide long-term benefits because more drivers will want to drive these roads and return congestion levels back to before. I'm approaching my argument from the general anti-car perspective of https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/.

I'd like to better understand how you came to the idea of removing the entry.

Best,

Ahmed VisualPlugin Abo-Shadi

Please see the discussion at [4]. If you would like to plead the case for inclusion that's the place to do it. Mr. Swordfish (talk) 15:35, 26 February 2024 (UTC)