Thanks everyone for your ideas. I'm familiar with some of the references — they are good reminders — and look forward to reading Thurston's paper, and the science writings. I think it's an occupational hazard of being an expert in any field, not just math, that it can be hard to explain what you do to an outsider. Nonetheless I think it's important to do, and not just for outsiders, but also for people inside the field. At least it's important to me — the dearth of mathematicians talking about what mathematics is I find intolerable, and makes me distrustful of mathematics as a field. Well then I'll write something up and post it. On Sun, Aug 11, 2019 at 4:48 PM <bradklee@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Scott,
There really is no definition that adequately explains science at the level of its practitioners, and attempts to do so usually turn out looking bad on the author.
It’s much more common to hear arguments about what science is not (think of all the rejection letters), but this still turns out laughable at times.
I liked reading R. Dawkin’s “Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing” and F. Dyson “Scientist as a Rebel”. Both do an adequate job of incorporating diversity, and some of the content is mathematical.
However, both of these references have elitist leanings, so may be more useful as a template to success or as competitor works, rather than as supporting citations.
Cheers —brad
On Aug 11, 2019, at 11:07 AM, Scott Kim <scottekim1@gmail.com> wrote:
Does anyone know of a clear explanation written for nonmathematicians of the fundamental types of things research mathematicians do, and why?
I'm planning to write about how the process of inventing puzzles is similar to the process fo doing mathematical research, and how we can teach kids about mathematical research by having them invent puzzles. I'd like to reference other authors, and wonder what has been written that isn't just mathematicians talking to mathematicians.
The authors I know who have attempted this are Keith Devlin in Introduction to Mathematical Thinking, written to tell math grad students how "real" mathematics differs from how math is conventionally taught in K-12, and Eugenia Cheng in many of her books, starting with How to Bake Pi. These are good, but there's room for more voices. _______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com https://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun
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