Re: Looking for a cartoon

In article
<38bbb444-6791-4a05-8078-d4b6af858740@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"porky_pig_jr@xxxxxxxxxxx" <porky_pig_jr@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Jul 6, 7:18 pm, Stephen Montgomery-Smith
<step...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:
I saw a cartoon on the internet entitled something like "what math
professors want you to believe" and it had one man saying to another "we
are going to loose this contract unless you can calculate this integral
using spherical coordinates - and show all the working."

If anyone has an URL to this cartoon, I would greatly appreciate it. I
want to use it in a talk.

And seconds later I found it!

http://www.math.cornell.edu/~noonan/what-college-professors-want-you-...

Yeah. That's pretty much what you can read on this site every once in
a while. "If you don't know math, you'll end up flipping the
hamburgers at McDonald." Or, I would say, you'll end up becoming a hip-
hop star making gazillion dollars. Or "radio personality" with a
subsequent career as a politician. Making gazillion dollars,
naturally.

And on the same subject, I remember the posting with a question: does
computer programmer need to know math? Naturally the answers was "if
you don't know math, you'll never be a computer programmer, but end up
flipping the hamburgers at McDonald". Naturally none of the those
posting those comments were professional programmers; may be familiar
with scientific/number crunching type of programming a bit but not
with the programming in general. Ironically roughly at the same time
there was a thread on computer-oriented site (forgot which one, may be
osnews.com), and most of the well-known professional programmers
(like Linus Torvald) said "you need to know very little of math, or
simply none". Now we're talking of programmers, not of computer-
scientist types like Donald Knuth.

And yet on the same subject, I remember another completely idiotic
claim that if you don't know Linear Algebra, you can't be a good
dentist. The reasoning was like that: a good dentist must have very
good knowledge of Chemistry (rather questionable claim, to start
with), and a good knowledge of Chemistry is not possible without
knowledge of Linear Algebra. Pathetic bull***. Why professional
mathematicians exhibit almost Pavlovian's dog kind of responses like
those? Relax. You don't need to be so defensive.

Nobody has to do anything. Nevertheless, anybody who has
learned mathematics considers the investment productive.
Students whining "Why do I have to learn this?" totally
miss the point. Obviously, they have contracted with the
professors. The student contracts to set aside his infantile
delusions of omniscience, and the professor contracts to
directly transmit apprehension of the way by_whatever_means_necessary.

Most people are smarter, faster, and more clever than I.
I made my way in computers; but never accepted computer
people who dismiss mathematics, regardless of how clever
they are. Computer science at any level is mathematical.
Those who are not formally grounded in mathematics reinvent
it for themselves as they go. A waste of their cleverness.

--
Michael Press
.

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