I mostly word my test and homework questions using the kind of "math language" students will encounter in future classes.
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I mostly word my test and homework questions using the kind of "math language" students will encounter in future classes. But, sometimes I wonder if mathematics, famous for precision and logic could make more of an effort to be clear.
A student came to me "It says to find the slope of the curve at x=3 but when I graph f(x)=4x-3 it's a line!"
I can only say "It's just math speak. We call continuous functions 'curves' even when they aren't curvy."
Which is good to know for future math.
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I mostly word my test and homework questions using the kind of "math language" students will encounter in future classes. But, sometimes I wonder if mathematics, famous for precision and logic could make more of an effort to be clear.
A student came to me "It says to find the slope of the curve at x=3 but when I graph f(x)=4x-3 it's a line!"
I can only say "It's just math speak. We call continuous functions 'curves' even when they aren't curvy."
Which is good to know for future math.
Some of the quirks of "mathspeak" can be traced back to particular professors. For example calling the subscript of 0 "nought" -- what is wrong with "sub zero?" nothing really. But, knowing it can be called "nought" makes the landscape a little less unfamiliar.
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I mostly word my test and homework questions using the kind of "math language" students will encounter in future classes. But, sometimes I wonder if mathematics, famous for precision and logic could make more of an effort to be clear.
A student came to me "It says to find the slope of the curve at x=3 but when I graph f(x)=4x-3 it's a line!"
I can only say "It's just math speak. We call continuous functions 'curves' even when they aren't curvy."
Which is good to know for future math.
Math has culture and is culture.
So it has taboos and secret handshakes and the proper way to behave at the dinner table.
In case of math: "Words have no meaning until we define them."
Lemma 1: Most of the time, mathematicians don't actually bother to define words.
(Shoutout to my university professor, who answered to a question where we were not supposed to "use anything from the lecture": "Well, body axioms are obviously allowed.")
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Some of the quirks of "mathspeak" can be traced back to particular professors. For example calling the subscript of 0 "nought" -- what is wrong with "sub zero?" nothing really. But, knowing it can be called "nought" makes the landscape a little less unfamiliar.
I can't really get annoyed at students for being confused by and even balking at "mathspeak" after being incredibly particular with them about how they write their equations and the way they use vocabulary.
I won't let them call an ellipse an "oval" or mix up a square with a cube. But here we are calling something that isn't curved at all a "curve."
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F myrmepropagandist shared this topic
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I mostly word my test and homework questions using the kind of "math language" students will encounter in future classes. But, sometimes I wonder if mathematics, famous for precision and logic could make more of an effort to be clear.
A student came to me "It says to find the slope of the curve at x=3 but when I graph f(x)=4x-3 it's a line!"
I can only say "It's just math speak. We call continuous functions 'curves' even when they aren't curvy."
Which is good to know for future math.
@futurebird
I started typing up a joke about anything with a defined 2nd derivative being a curve, but you said continuous, which kinda overlaps with defined 2nd derivative, its not the same thing ... -
I can't really get annoyed at students for being confused by and even balking at "mathspeak" after being incredibly particular with them about how they write their equations and the way they use vocabulary.
I won't let them call an ellipse an "oval" or mix up a square with a cube. But here we are calling something that isn't curved at all a "curve."
I mean I guess if you want to run along and define "curvature" you can say it has a curvature of zero.
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Some of the quirks of "mathspeak" can be traced back to particular professors. For example calling the subscript of 0 "nought" -- what is wrong with "sub zero?" nothing really. But, knowing it can be called "nought" makes the landscape a little less unfamiliar.
@futurebird And some of these professors were plural, like Nicolas Bourbaki, or empty sets of a higher order, like Josiah S. Carberry.
