I don't think any of these are arcane puzzles for someone who wants a mathematical career, which is the target audience (see, 'likely one of the first irrational numbers you encountered in your mathematical career').
This is for undergraduate education. A 20 year old now was 6 years old when Minecraft came out. A 20 year old now studying math has very likely played a lot of Minecraft.
Also, the authors' respective institutions don't have a graduate level math program. Lynch's personal research is in combinatorics ("particularly connections between combinatorics and representation theory, topological combinatorics") and Weselcouch's is in "enumerative and algebraic combinatorics".
Rather than attribute it to "late-stage research boredom", why not interpret it as two young math professors (they are both in their 30s, I think) coming up with interesting ideas for their undergrad, math-interested students?
Because I believe that is what the ultimate aim of research is these days: to attract more young minds to eventually contribute to meaningless pursuits.
No need to turn that downerism into doomerism, or imply it's some sort of new thing.
Like how the bowling ball pendulum lab is a stunt to attract students to physics, and the Briggs-Rauscher reaction a stunt to attract students to chemistry?
Sure, why not. Define "stunt" broadly enough and it can include anything which piques the interest.
> Why does it seem that everyone bends over backwards in the US instead of confronting the math education problem head on?
Why does it seem you have no joy?
> don't approximate it with video games, just teach it head on
This is head-on teaching how to approximate the values of four different mathematical constants.
You don't even get to the Minecraft way to approximate Apéry's constant until you've read that it's a special case of the Riemann zeta , and seen two ways to define it (as an infinite sum and as an infinite product), in order to explain why the Minecraft method works.
Two spaces after a period and a YouTube channel with a few dozens of views per video. The co-author is his wife.
"Mathematics Magazine intended audience is teachers of collegiate mathematics, especially at the junior/senior level, and their students."
I wish them the best. And I'm glad everyone got another sentence on their CV. But wow.
I’ve actually been teaching my 2nd grade son Math recently though Minecraft- things like using euclidean coordinates, triangulating positions, etc. we’re both having fun and he’s learning valuable ideas.
You seem to have a dry, joyless, and uninspired view of math and how it should be taught. Traditional math education has done an impressive job of turning something incredibly fun and useful into something that seems stodgy, dry, and pointless.
I’ve always had a fun playful view of math that I learned from my own parents and mentors, and I think that is what has led me to continue studying and using math to solve real world scientific problems as an adult.
Moreover, just because Minecraft is a video game doesn’t mean it has no place in real scientific research- it is a virtual world with a modular plugin system that can allow a researcher to create and interact with simulations of almost any type of system imaginable. People have executed realistic physics experiments, designed working cpus, etc in it. I think there is a lot of potential for really significant research within it.
> "just teach it head on, and teach it well."
Seriously, as someone who was an assistant-teacher at university for a year, few things annoy me more than people with very strong opinions on education, whose confidence is very clearly based on not knowing the slightest thing about how education works.
Good luck trying to brute-force information into unwilling brains. Especially in a form where there is no connection back to the lived experience of the people being taught, meaning they have no point of entry.
Or perhaps your point is that we shouldn't do outreach, and only the people who already found maths on their own are allowed into this exclusive club of people who consider themselves oh so intelligent? Like being in favor the mathematicians equivalent of a "gatekeeping hipster" attitude?
Honestly, I don't know which interpretation looks worse.
I interpret it that you shouldn't need these gimmicks to get people interested in math, but rather change the system so people would be more interested in those jobs or fields, by making engineers, academics and teachers into more respected members of the society.
I am from Czechia and I see this as a feature of neoliberal capitalism. The socialist movement, both in the Western and Eastern bloc, had a lot of emphasis on educating people. China now does something similar. But under neoliberalism, the respect of people is tied to money-making or entrepreneurship. This view, critical of low priority of education under neoliberalism, seems to be shared by many people outside the U.S. today.
A significant portion of the people who reject the school system do so entirely based on fundamentalist religious reason, specifically things like "evolution is a thing" and "here's how you have safe sex".
The primary driver of American school boards in some states literally seems to be getting the bible into American schools for some reason.
The problem is that thanks to 1% of overly active idiots it quicky degraded to "gender affirming closets" at our libraries and transgender lessons for 4th graders.
just 1%?
I don't know what you think the "math education problem" is, but I guarantee that being nasty to people is not the way to solve it.
At least this was not supported by an NSF grant (There are problems more deserving of NSF grants than approximating pi with square blocks.)
(Also, I don’t think this is any surprise to you, but an NSF proposal requires engagement with the literature, and a statement of contributions.)
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. They include:
"Please don't fulminate."
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
I did not intend to break the rules badly (nor do I believe I did; I didn't fulminate nor called names). Instead I was called names by others replying to me. I will not participate in HN anymore.
I think this arXiv article could very well have been just a blog post. I don't get why they bothered with the pre-print... as if math research isn't low quality already.