How useless? Terence Tao made MRIs faster. That's a real thing that STEM and non-STEM people will maybe have to interact with at some point in their lives. Sure, we can blame science communicators. Should we put a bunch of banner ads on everything so that people know that math and science is involved in every thing?

I know there is some controversy, I would say that the field of study also “causes” controversy in a sense if the disagreement has to do with the subject itself, that is true for any field. For example, set theory “caused” significant controversy in the early years of its development, yes it was people in disagreement and insulting one another, but the fundamental questions were from the subject matter itself.

Regarding widespread perception of math as useless, I guess I was thinking mainly of academic circles rather than the general public in that statement. Even while I hated math, I knew it wasn’t useless because my late father (who was a civil engineer) was very good at it, and he was adamant on teaching it to us. It didn’t work on me back then though lol.

As I was getting more interested in math while getting my degree in computer science, I realized much of my own issue with math earlier in life was because of the same thing just about everyone else that struggles with it has: the lack of any practical relevance in my own life because of how it’s generally taught. And the fact that many math teachers themselves don’t know the foundational/philosophical aspects of the subject, which would go a long way I think towards explaining that relevance if introduced in some pieces earlier on, rather than treating it like a rote memorization subject and being so focused on continual practice to develop heuristics with exercises that some students couldn’t care less about. Of course, that works for some people clearly, but it didn’t for me at the time and I’m of the opinion high schools should focus more on discrete math like set theory, and formal logic rather than calculus, which is of little relevance at that stage unless you’re also invested in studying physics. Sets and logic on the other hand imo are general enough right at the beginning to be relevant to just about everything people of just about any age are concerned with.

> Funny, I think it's a very widespread opinion to think of math as useless. In the US at least it's a major failure of the education system and STEM communicators.

That is a US centric view, and it's curious how things came to be that way. European and Asian countries take mathematics more seriously.

What a complete nonsense. Math is no more 'the mind of god' than polio is. If anything math is a triumph of mind over religion because it gave us the tools to power a vast chunk of the scientific revolution. Without that we'd be cowering in the dark and hoping that the sun would rise tomorrow.

We need to rethink the idea of textbooks as static documents. LLMs make it possible to build something like "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" for real. Let's go.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/172835/the-diamond-...