A little knowledge can be more dangerous - and embarrassing - than complete ignorance.
Yes. As a math professor, I sort of agree and sort of disagree with this post. On the one hand, people have lots of misunderstandings about math, as people like John Allen Paulos have written. But on the other hand, it's NOT true that everything has a simple mathematical model. Often mathematical models that might be useful in physics are not especially useful elsewhere, and even more often the most important thing is not the model's predictions, but the errors.
Agreed, but people with enough experience of the limits of simple mathematical models in one field are less likely to make that mistake in other fields.
A hypothetical "The Simple Maths of Everything" textbook should include warnings about the limits of the models, and a few memorable examples of how those models go wrong.
A little knowledge can be more dangerous - and embarrassing - than complete ignorance.
Yes. As a math professor, I sort of agree and sort of disagree with this post. On the one hand, people have lots of misunderstandings about math, as people like John Allen Paulos have written. But on the other hand, it's NOT true that everything has a simple mathematical model. Often mathematical models that might be useful in physics are not especially useful elsewhere, and even more often the most important thing is not the model's predictions, but the errors.
Look at th... (read more)