This is my first time watching this movie, so according to my new rules, I'm doing this as a video only review.
I don't start the actual review of the movie until 15:00 in. The first 15 minutes are just me talking about all my thoughts about math in general.
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13 comments:
I was somewhat good at it, or at the very least thought I was good at it and loved it. Later on I thought maybe I could learn math really well if I was taught it the right way and got to learn the right materials.
At the high education level, learning math resembles learning a language more than doing quantity/numerical calculations. (somebody joked their family member was weirded out to see their math homework not having any number).
My guess of the American mathematician you mention being Martin Gardner - not based on anything, just a wild guess.
Maybe I also didn'nt truly appreciate math as puzzles. Even worse, math as abstraction at the university level.
IMO people without the natural inclination and might well consider themselves unsuitable for math and ditch it, instead of wondering "perhaps I actually like math but I was forced or taught the wrong wayy".
Well, in some ways if Vietnamese don't say math it would be very stigmatized. Think of it as combination of communist ideology and confucianist attitude (or asian attitude if you cant call it confucianist). i don't agree much with the 'lack of freedom' point, maybe a bit valid but i don't feel so.
if you grew up in vietnam you would definitely be incentivized to love math
Vietnamese also brag about not remember much knowledge studied. vietnamese also don't remember sin cos - one guy in my discord brags about not studying those which is what led him to success.
i'm compsci/software engineer major (dropped out) - can say i'm clueless about the usage of advanced math as well (cant see/dunno vietnamese jobs that would use them, or even know how people in the west tend to use them). discrete math could be very important however
math is still social mobility to the most specialized thing out there. can't have children completely unused unseen to something that important.
vietnamese pisa scores are questionable. also asians mostly only know chug-and-plug, number of actual famous mathematicians also few (ramanujan-indian, some guys in china, some guys in japan). one girl from taiwan once made a notorious paper reinventing calculus (medical journals called her out 'we had that already'). point = not like many ppl around world are good at it.
algorithms blah blah would be cateforized applied math. just thought i would mention. pure math (very important) isn't like that.
soviet union = the go-to country for mathematicians. back then ppl learned russian for math (check ouut ur countryman neal koblitz's memoir, and a mention by lee kuan yew on letting his son go to moscow to learn math somewhere, to name some few examples). point = soviet union collapsed. maybe math not so much powerful. although imiportant
agree you can't just change method or policy or blah blah and ppl would love math. my family must have thought they were clever and encouraged me to love it. saw one such thought by another asian.
sounds like one of those typical documentary/book that touts math (they are mostly similar to each other) - american books may inject in some social activism, but generally they all desribe 'math = beautiful' so p much demonstrating something you already see/not see
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I will elaborate on those remarks later, and maybe some storytelling as well - thank you for the review.
As always, thank you for helping to explain Vietnamese culture to me. I look forward to more stories.
Well, so now, to elaborate on the points, I will try to limit myself to talking about "math culture in Vietnam" since you seem to be more interested in that than other things. There's not much to say actually.
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In Vietnam, math is considered as the most "intelligent" subject - you can substitute the word with "hardest" or "intellectually demanding" or et cetera, you catch my drift. Given the monotonous view, people just naturally conclude that math must be the subject you are good at, if you want to be considered intelligent at all, or if you are any capable student. Thus, you can see why Vietnamese are fixated on math as if it’s the only thing that matters. Those that can’t do math are considered good-for-nothing retards, those that say they don’t like math are interpreted in the worst faith possible as if they are bad at math themselves - and hence nobody dares to spout their dislike of math. That’s why every single Vietnamese student has to write their favorite subject is ‘math’ - it’s pretty much a repressive culture that doesn’t even tolerate people saying what they like or dislike [1]. This is highly ironic in a way, given the very lack of a mathematical tradition in this very country (people pretty much started touting it only very recently, maybe after the French came and there was contact with the USSR [2]).
[1] This reminds me of the funny survey that compared Chinese students vs American students asking those students what they want to do in the future:
Well, I’m more surprised by how Chinese still get away with putting in ‘Youtuber’ as an answer without fear of being beaten.
Although I guess I’m interpreting this survey way too much that it says - maybe it’s just that by the time China got caught up economically for their people to even know something about space exploration, Americans have already stopped caring about those things. Kind of like rural peasant suddenly discovered jazz music.
[2] Saying 'touting' is to use a more precise word than 'love', Vietnamese don't love math as much as they love demanding others to be good at it - in so far as I can see. Also I'm fuzzy on the mathematical history in my country, so you may not want to quote me on the point about when Vietnam started loving math - although as far as I have read, there isn't much mathematics being done even counting since the First Indochina War
(I do recommend checking out what Neal Koblitz has to write about the history of mathematics in Vietnam. Ironic a Vietnamese like myself has to check out what an American foreigner writes to be informed about my own country.)
One favorite cliche Vietnamese tend to say, whenever somebody has a question that needs to be resolved, is “How retarded! This is so easy and yet you can’t even solve it” [“Ngu thế! Dễ vậy mà cũng không làm được”]. I hope you still remember that I once said Vietnamese can’t explain anything at all - the eternal explaining method has always been A does something and has B imitate it.
At some point during primary and middle school, better students tend to be put to some special or gifted or whatever classes. Not a separate class, those students still have to attend their usual classes, but extracurricular classes. Nobody has a say on whether they can come or stop coming at all: their parents and the teachers don’t tend to tolerate them stop coming to the special classes.
Lack of decent explanations for math is not the worst thing. Lack of decent materials to study math is the worst. The materials for gifted or special students are pretty much just some printed books that contain hard math exercises without guiding you how to solve them or even why you are solving them. This makes saying to your parents “I love math and I want to study math more” akin to saying “I want to bang my head to the wall”. If you could have read the titles of the STEM textbooks in the bookstores, they are all geared toward prepping students to pass tests, not for the sake of learning those subjects for themselves. As an anecdote, the top student [3] in my primary/middle school once called me silly for reading a math book when there was no upcoming test.
[3] When a student is considered a top student, math score tends to be the decisive factor.
When the students don’t attend those classes for advanced students, their parents have them come to ‘extracurricular classes’. Those classes teach nothing more special than school materials, but for some reason you can’t argue back to your own parents, you have to attend them constantly. So far as I can gauge the logic, it seems to be that the more time on a given thing the better you get at it, so if you learn the English word “chicken” 5000 times repeatedly, you will get to know the English language - this is how the parents’ rigid logic seems to me, they don’t care and even know what those classes teach (they don’t teach anything), but they are adamant their children have to attend, since if you don’t learn the word “chicken” 5000 times you are not gonna be able to get to university.
And this is not even mentioning the bad luck of having to study with some troublemakers who don’t even want to study but are put to those classes as well - I remember getting distracted by them pulling my notebook to copy my solutions, then scream at me for the incorrect answers “Because the other notebooks I copied from have different solutions!!!”.
In university, no matter which non-humanities major you choose, you have to learn further math and STEM courses. It’s called general education or something like that (“các môn đại cương”). I majored in Information Technology, and I had to learn (excluding algorithm stuff)… let me count… 2 university calculus courses, 1 discrete math, 1 graph theory (math elective), 1 probability and statistics, 1 linear algebra. They are pretty much mandatory, so you can see why I decided to drop out! I saw some guy online saying they had to major in humanities in order to dodge math courses.
To clarify some points I made now - which aren't limited to Vietnam:
1. This is to say now that having read enough advanced mathematics textbooks in English, I just realized I have never loved math as I have always thought of myself. It has always been a subject that requires discipline, and if you find wasting hours on solving math exercises akin to donating blood, then you definitely don't like it. I heard anecdotes of people doing math exercises without much efforts, in the same way people like myself don't prep for foreign language exams.
5. To read math blogs and other places is to see a lot anecdotes of people exclaiming "Wow, I have never known math could be this fascinating! If only I was taught math the right way!". Well, maybe because mathematics has never been fascinating in that way? Few popular scientists from Einstein to the guys that built nuclear weapons have ever had any good thing to say about their own teachers. Even though there also have been people who were massively and positively impacted by their own good teachers to have their own day. I think people should just accept if it's not for them then it's not for them.
Advanced mathematics, except for discrete mathamatics, aren't really like the math you learn in lower level schools anyway. The higher you get the more abstract it is, people like Feynman literally steered away from studying mathematics all because of this very reason. Anyway the point being that it's silly to lament of not having known much about some certain thing, when even if you knew some tad bit further, you would hardly like it as you thought you would have.
8. There's one guy I know online who love bragging about how thanks to being a lazy student in Vietnam, he turned out to be successful - since if he was any diligent and studied all the bull manure the education system shoved down his throat, he wouldn't have learned any worthy knowledge. He compared how analytical Canadian math is that requires you to know some planning (maybe discrete math?) and _actually understand how to use it_, unlike the Vietnamese mathematical curriculum that teach Sin Cos Tan, and students are left clueless where are they even used.
9. Actually Machine Learning may need students to be good at math, specifically calculus, linear algebra, and probability and statistics. But then again maybe not necessarily, especially when you are not doing research and only try to implement stuff. As far as I can gauge from the ML lecture notes, people only need those to know those math to understand the mathematical formulas used for those algorithms - which can be implemented without knowing the math. I myself don't know what do the average ML people have to do to pass the tests, or what do they do at work. But I once saw they joked online "There's a reason Machine Learning is in the Computer Science department, rather than Mathematics department".
My 'Intro to Informatik' professor once told the class "For anybody who wants to specialize in Computer Science [4], you have to be good at math..." - but then he hesitated, and changed his words "...no, not being good at math is okay as well."
[4] In Vietnam, Computer Science is a sub-specialization of the Information Technology major/faculty.
11. Vietnamese PISA scores is self-explanatory - the country is pretty much just incentivized to or love to do this sht. If it's not government initiative then there must also have been pressure from the top to make the bottom try to make the results look nice. It's ridiculous to see the Asian countries with reading comprehension issues to score higher on literacy and math metrics on some bogus test than the West. Speaking of Vietnamese education, either it is way too backwards and haven't got out of the muddy yet, or is in a tremendous crisis right now. Students after students came out of schools being absolutely clueless about anything at all - but yet if anything is an issue, the fault must lie on the student (I remember my high school principle saying something akin to the system is okay based on those results of high scores, so if there are problems they must lie on you).
As for the medical researcher reinventing calculus, check out: https://www.reddit.com/r/badmathematics/comments/52bivx/medical_researcher_discovers_integration_gets_75/
Although, as a trivia: reinventing calculus and presented it as something novel has happened at least twice in the last century.
13. I think I will copy and paste a personal blog post here:
Title: Ah yes the oft mentioned "charged water jars in front of TV" phenomenon
On the internet you may occassionally find some Russians, when they talk about their own Soviet era country, bring up the incident I have written on the title in order to demonstrate how unbelievable their older countrymen are, in juxtaposition to how their education is lauded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Chumak
Really something to see how the land that built space crafts and other incredible stuff to... This of course is way very common in any country.
Moral of the lesson I gleam from this = people who think education can solve moral problems and ignorance certainly don't know what education is or should be. One that I have always regarded on the level of truth.
Related article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jun/06/marc-bennetts-anatoly-kashpirovsky-russia-rasputin
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Almost forgot to mention that it's funny how Chinese didn't even seem to have the stereotype of being good at math back one two centuries ago. If you read directly Einstein's travel diaries, he did mention an anecdote of how a Portuguese tried to teach some Chinese math but their minds couldn't seem to process it - and Einstein seems to have approved of what the British were doing of putting the most capable Chinese in charge to impart Western civilization (don't remember the exact wording, but well...). Relevant article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/15/chinese-defend-einsteins-diaries-filthy-obtuse
Many thanks for your interesting comments. It's given me a lot of food for thought.
Also as a counter example to your point about "math is the only thing they can do calculations on their own, that's why Vietnamese love math": in middle school, we had to learn to code in a programming language which is PASCAL. Learning to program is the most interactive and free to control thing you can ever have, yet barely a single student liked or was good at it since they couldn't understand it. Although to be fair, it's all in English so there's a factor that hinders their understanding of it.
But what can be said about literature or whatnot, authoritarian teaching, can also be said about STEM subjects as well. You have to submit solutions according to a certain form, solutions have to write clearly the xyz things without a clear reason being given. I don't know about the West, but here we have something called "oral examination" - students get to the black board and recite the prose form of the math formula or something like that.
To phrase what I already said in another words: you may not end up liking math if you was born in countries like Vietnam, but you would be proned to say you like math (even though once scrutinized, deep down you may not).
I would say Vietnamese love math as much as Americans or Russians - unless you wanna count people who are not authentic to themselves.
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This is unrelated to math as well, but one favorite cliche phrase said by Vietnamese teachers being that "Anybody who doesn't want to study, just scram out of this class". This is akin to saying "If you hate living with the society, just kill yourself". If any of us had any choice, we would have smashed those teachers' faces before we left the classroom in the first place to begin with. There's a whole topic about how East Asian culture enables teacher's authority and their abuses and their hypocrisies, but let me digress.
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This is none of my business, but as I just checked Gerrymandering doesn't require more mathematics than Sudoku games. Whoever say "people need to know math to understand Gerrymandering" are being a Steven Pinker. Personally I think people should stop involving mathematics to unrelated contexts like social or political activism - given that people can barely see where they are gonna use math because of its inherent very limited nature in the first place, how is it gonna be used well in some of these contexts? This is just repeating what I have already said, but given that the country whose capital has the highest concentration of mathematicians in the past has collapsed, and East Asian countries whose children are pushed to study mathematics intensively are notorious for being politcally apathetic (at least speaking for China and Japan) - I think people should stop thinking of math as something versatile that unlocks some enlightening knowledge, it's pretty much just a set of tools (or formalization) used for the specific niches.
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You don't need to reply to these comments. Sorry for bothering again.
I really should have mentioned this: Another reason the Vietnamese students you see all write math as their fav subject = they want to impress people how great they're.
A lot of interesting stuff here. Thank you.
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