What Is Math?
This is wonderful. I love when memes breed philosophy. We&#x27;re teaching math wrong. It&#x27;s as plain as day to me. Or rather we teach the wrong maths to the wrong students. If Marcie can&#x27;t find a useful application on day one of the &quot;theory&quot; she learns in school, what is the point? It&#x27;s a 19th century curriculum for a 21st century world. Basic accounting and personal finance would probably serve most students better.<p>As to the epistemological quandary, I always return to Geometry or Visual Mathematics. Consider the infinite ways of calculating the digits of PI. In &quot;Playing Pool with PI&quot;, Galperin demonstrated an analog computer that could calculate the digits of PI using only the perfectly elastic collisions of two billiard balls on a pool table. It works for all integral base number systems, and can even be extended to irrational numbers. And recently Google Brain&#x27;s Adam Brown made an equally stunning observation: Galperin&#x27;s bouncing billiard balls look identical to the Grover Quantum Search algorithm!<p>Playing Pool with |ψ⟩: from Bouncing Billiards to Quantum Search<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1912.02207" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1912.02207</a>