On Tue, 2 Oct 2007, Sergi Lario wrote:
Four years later, without being sure about what to study i decided to start Maths in the University of Barcelona.
You will find that even though Miller won the Putnam and has a doctorate in Math, and even though I have a bachelor's in Math too, it's still rare to see Sylow subgroups and Noether isomorphisms around here. At best I could find one guy in one conf who was using pd in relationship to "free monoïds"... I have the impression that it was a once-in-a-lifetime happening.
I try to plug isomorphisms around, when I can, but still no luck for Noether's theorems... :}
Still there is quite a bit of other kinds of interesting math that is more commonplace in pd... especially FFT, but also, I did use eigendecomposition as a way to convert an ellipse equation to an angle and two radiuses.
I spent i couple of years without before i left, but there i learnt math's abstractions and programming basics, that was worth it!
IMHO, a lot of computer science and software engineering could count as math, given how much the topic of math has expanded in the last ~200 years... I have the impression that the last 50 years were pretty much the addition of "except stuff related to computers" to the definition of what math is. The problem with that is that those topics are also related to the understanding of the processes of math using math itself - making math more recursive and "self-aware"...
Anyway, I still think that a math education is interesting, as long as you didn't limit yourself to what you had to study for the exam, and that you try to mentally connect math to as much of your experience as possible instead of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociation_%28psychology%29 (a kind of insanity that is considered perfectly normal when it comes to some university degrees ... ;-)
I think that there's plenty of room to make pd more "mathy" but that non-math people might not necessarily recognise those concepts as being math, and a lot of them have mental association of the word "math" with the situation of just following rules without making sense of them, for the benefit of getting good grades from bad teachers...
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