We need to pivot math towards intuition and accessibility.
Math has built a gated, inaccessible institution which - by design or not - served as a moat.
I believe math has little to do with mathematical notation - intuition is much more important. One can have intuition but not be able to “read math” - much as many musicians don’t “read music”.
Reading math however does not guarantee ideas or intuition. And those are what math needs.
> One can have intuition but not be able to “read math” - much as many musicians don’t “read music”.
Is it really that common for musicians to not be able to read music? I'm not a musician so I wouldn't know, but it seems far-fetched. Like the story that Einstein failed math. I likewise doubt that there are many people who would be good mathematicians but unable to learn the language.
Sure notation is arbitrary and not the actual "truth" of math, but we need some way to talk about it, so why not just learn the accepted standards?
There might be at least one awesome author out there who never learned to write or type, but they're probably extremely rare, because becoming great at something usually entails a lot of practice, and that's hard to get when you're not making the effort to learn the basics.
In any case, LLMs are probably a bad way to "pivot math towards intuition and accessibility" because they, as language models, are great at generating a bunch of jargon that is hard for somebody with no training to tell apart. See the recent story [0]. Here the author (perhaps) succeeded with his proof, but was it because of superior intuition? Or just throwing compute at the wall to see what sticks?
strideashort · · focus · HN ↗
Math has built a gated, inaccessible institution which - by design or not - served as a moat.
I believe math has little to do with mathematical notation - intuition is much more important. One can have intuition but not be able to “read math” - much as many musicians don’t “read music”.
Reading math however does not guarantee ideas or intuition. And those are what math needs.
streetfighter64 · · focus · HN ↗
Is it really that common for musicians to not be able to read music? I'm not a musician so I wouldn't know, but it seems far-fetched. Like the story that Einstein failed math. I likewise doubt that there are many people who would be good mathematicians but unable to learn the language.
Sure notation is arbitrary and not the actual "truth" of math, but we need some way to talk about it, so why not just learn the accepted standards?
There might be at least one awesome author out there who never learned to write or type, but they're probably extremely rare, because becoming great at something usually entails a lot of practice, and that's hard to get when you're not making the effort to learn the basics.
In any case, LLMs are probably a bad way to "pivot math towards intuition and accessibility" because they, as language models, are great at generating a bunch of jargon that is hard for somebody with no training to tell apart. See the recent story [0]. Here the author (perhaps) succeeded with his proof, but was it because of superior intuition? Or just throwing compute at the wall to see what sticks?
[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49755024">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49755024
strideashort · · focus · HN ↗
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