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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1 comment:
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.
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