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Now… back to our Monday Mailbag…
Regular readers will recall that I’m not particularly hip. I’m not down with the latest tik tok, what nots…and to this date I still haven’t fully figured out how Twitter works. (Umm.. how do I see comments on tweets???)
And yet, somehow -even from under the apparent rock which I live – I learned about a recent ‘Tok’ that went viral on the Twittersphere.
It was of a young girl asking about the validity of math… in her very first video she mentions Pythagoras, but it is her second video that she more clearly explains her inquiry.
Tragically indicative of the modern vindictiveness found online (haters, it appears, are gonna hate), the teenager was lambasted for being ‘dumb’ by an insecure and judgemental faceless crowd.
Philosophers, mathematicians, physicists and the genuinely curious, however, praised the highschooler for asking a serious question… one that has plagued the inquisitive since time itself.
In fact, I thought we should tackle the subject as well…To recap the adolescent:
How do people know what they are looking for? How did they know their formulas were right?
Adding to this, I would like to open the discussion beyond the confines of mathematics and algebra, to everything as we know it… or don’t, for that matter. Essentially:
How do we know what we are looking for? And how do we know when we’ve found it?
As always you can write to me directly at [email protected] or comment below.
One comment
As a Lifelong learner with a long life behind me, I would venture that there lies accessible to many, in the less obvious intricacies of the human mind, an ability to combine the known in various ways, and thus to find new questions. Socrates was trying to plant this kind of thinking when he challenged his hearers. Of course those who are challenged are a various lot. Some are adverse to challenges and cringe, or argue with this approach, thinking that a retort is what is needed. But I believe that Socrates and many other thinkers were trying to hold a space for original thought. This is not commonly achieved, but when it does result there often follows a breakthrough to the culture at large, though this sometimes takes a while. Paradigm shifts have sometimes a slow motion through culture, and usually diverge into something, the third thing, perhaps, that was not intended at the start. This exploration is how we learn by doing, what it is that we are looking for. Connecting the threads often leads to wisdom. Meanwhile some explanations to the young just need to be re-stated for those learning minds, in a way that gets through each individual’s way of thinking. Teachers are ideally various in their approach, thus the value of reading all these classics!
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