Re: Latin and other irrelevant topics

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com> writes:

> > Many important things have been
> > discovered during the last few decades, but I doubt that (e.g.) the
> > classification of finite simple groups is relevant for school teaching
> 
> Here I think we disagree.

Not necessarily.  I don't think it has to be that way, I was just
describing the status quo here.  In fact I hope that some day, modern
mathematics and, more important, the joy of mathematics hit the
schools (calculus is taught in most parts in Germany as if we were in
the 18th or even 17th century, it's pretty confusing and has an aura
as if it was a Dark Art).

> I think that there is quite a bit of modern mathematics that could
> be brought to the high school student and the undergraduate (even
> the ones who aren't majoring in mathematics) that is highly
> relevant.

Many things are relevant, but the interest in mathematics is generally
low among the students in engineering and computer science (at least
that's my impression).  As a result, most lecturers here seem to focus
on the basic stuff and present it in a rigorous manner.

> Non-standard analysis, differential forms (can be introduced with
> multivariable calculus), category theory (a high school level
> approach in the book by Lawvere and Schanuel, linear programming,
> really the list is pretty long.

To be honest, I don't think non-standard analysis and differential
forms are really important (compared to the Lebesgue integral, which
is relatively old and not often taught to undergrads), but early
exposure to category theory is probably a good idea (after you have
seen a bunch of algebraic structures, of course).  But it's probably a
bad idea to discuss such things with me because I'm heavily biased
(I'm hardly interested in calculus and applied mathematics, but I'll
admit that's the part which is relevant for most students).

> Personally, I'd much rather spend time studying math than studying Latin; 
> the latter seems a waste of time, like being forced to read Shakespeare. 

The way I learned Latin at school was a bit similar to real
mathematics, in fact more than math itself (we were taught the Latin
grammar in a rather formal way, and math mostly consisted of very
technical symbolic manipulations).