[n4r9]

Even without the context, there's something to be said for a formalised approach. When I was in undergrad there was a lecture course given by a notoriously aloof and formal lecturer. One of the other - more popular - lecturers decided to give an "understandable" alternative to the course at the same time of the day. Myself and a few others were in the 5% that continued with the official schedule. Those notes were hard as hell to work through, but once you understood something, you REALLY understood it.

One of the exam questions was conveniently targeted at one of the lectures from the more difficult course. I think it was proving that A5 is simple by considering the rotations of a dodecahedron.

[jacobolus]

I disagree. An overly dry and formal style (definition, definition, lemma, theorem, corollary, definition, lemma, lemma, theorem, ...) does not make students “really understand” the material. It just focuses students on low level details of formal definitions and symbolic manipulation and gives a lot of practice regurgitating/performing those, often at the expense of knowing the purpose or meaning of the subject. Low-level details are certainly essential, but the only way to really understand is to figure out what the formalism is for (what problems does it solve), grapple with the possibility space of definitions and theorems (if we picked this alternate definition, would that also get us where we want?), figure out how topics and structures relate to each-other, spend some time doing personal explorations, and build up mental models of what the definitions mean, not just their formal content.

A too-dry mathematics course/book is like a screenwriting course where you focus on snappy dialog and details of the setting but never talk about the plot or themes of the story.

[n4r9]

I don't disagree. What we found was that, starting from the lecture notes and a few examples, getting to the point where we could complete the exercises meant that we had to do most of the above figuring-out for ourselves. And because we did it ourselves rather than have it laid out for us, the learning was more established.

[necovek]

You seem to assume that a dry approach necessarily leads to not understanding the context.

TL;DR of the below: people differ in the way they learn, and anybody who disregards the dry approach simply because it doesn't work for the majority, is doing a disservice to someone it does work well for.

I've personally prepared for my high school and university math tests and exams (those consisting of mostly math "problems") by only focusing on the "dry theory" from mostly "dry" textbooks. I understood the context perfectly well, and I had multiple tests and written exams focused on traditional applied math problems where I came up with "novel" approaches by simply putting my dry knowledge to use (as in, approached a problem from theoretical definitions and theorems but completely not in the way they taught it or expected). I wasn't as fast as I would have been if I learned all the tricks of math problem solving vs just going from the dry theory (iow, I'd be getting B grades from very little preparation or even class attendance, but not for getting anything wrong, but just for not having the time to figure out everything).

But most people, teachers and professors included, seem to disregard people like me who are great at applying and seeing context from abstract theory. I never enjoyed practicing math problems just to be fast at math problems, but I very much enjoyed abstract theory building and application: my motivation was never competitive, at least not after 6th grade. For someone like me, it's not just "symbolic manipulation", but actually abstract concept manipulation.

In a way, I was seriously underserved by mathematics classes focused on different types of students than me. And this goes from primary school all the way to university.

So, if the goal is to find students like me, who are likely to excel at pure mathematics and won't have trouble applying it, we actually need a drier approach. Obviously, that's not the goal of primary education, but the same focus leads to less stellar outcomes even at higher levels of education.

What this article proposes is an even larger move in this direction, and people are arguing for it at all levels of education, without ever recognizing that there are people for whom the dry approach might work just as well, even if they are a minority.

[jacobolus]

> assume that a dry approach necessarily leads to not understanding the context

If you never hear what the purpose and context is of something, you certainly won’t magically infer the details. You might be able to guess some parts in broad strokes, but that speculation is just as likely to be completely wrong. For instance, someone learning about set theory for the first time, even if they are some kind of genius, isn’t going to immediately guess that it was established after a crisis in analysis sparked by Fourier theory, which was itself invented to solve tricky partial differential equations arising in physics. (In case anyone wants to learn about this, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBcWRZMP6xs)

Which is not to say that the presentation of mathematical topics should be primarily historical, but only that the context in mathematics is fractally deep everywhere you look.

> I understood the context perfectly well,

This is not plausible for anyone’s first course. Even life-long experts don’t understand the context “perfectly well”. We are talking about a subject with infinite depth and interrelation, and centuries of history.

[necovek]

Sure, but with mathematics, nobody is ever starting from scratch. And even the "driest" of educational books has some context in it. Or maybe I was lucky, and I haven't seen really dry books.

Initial topics on numbers and geometry have students already have some intuition on them, usually brought from home (eg. kids can count, add smaller numbers, understand differences between straight lines and circles...).

Similarly, coming into more advanced courses, I already had a bunch of context already at my disposal.

Like everything, it can go to an extreme in either direction, but I am mostly saying that I am comfortable with books that tend to be more on the "dry" end of the spectrum, and I can sometimes figure out many of those "dry theory" applications myself which brings motivation and joy (but certainly not all; lots of math has, as you point out, taken centuries for brilliant people to find solutions and tricks that work, and I don't kid myself that I can figure out all of that in a few months or years, let alone few hours — not without learning specifically of their tricks and solutions that do work). And it's definitely not the most efficient way to advance the science of mathematics — but we are discussing teaching and learning mathematics here: keeping students motivated is at the core of any successful learning experience.

Historical context is wonderful in mathematics because it allows one to really see what the original motivation for building up an abstract system was, and that's the best context.

[jacobolus]

> even the "driest" of educational books has some context in it

Have you ever tried reading Bourbaki?

[n4r9]

Are you claiming that no one can learn by reading Bourbaki,no matter how intelligent and motivated they are?

[necovek]

I haven't, so I'll look it up.