👨‍🏫 Instructor: Swarnim Kalbande
👨‍🏫 TAs: Kruti Sutaria, Michael Hollander
đź—“Â 6 classes from June 1st - July 6th, 2024
🕰️ Saturdays 2pm-4pm
🗺 Pier 57 Classrooms
đź’°Â Tuition: $100-$300 sliding scale (with need-based adjustment)
đź“‹Â Apply here for the in-person classes: https://forms.gle/XRkBFKPKLFMKebQ78 - there may be a waitlist and you will be notified via email if you make it into the course
đź‘ĄÂ 30 students
“Math is hard,” Barbie famously declared. Well, Barbie was right, but math is not uniquely hard. Playing the violin is hard, hitting a baseball is hard, and learning a second language is hard. What seems to make mathematics different from playing the violin or learning Chinese is that the struggle to play violin doesn’t make people feel defeated and dumb. Somehow, when we encounter difficulties in mathematics, our natural tendency is to retreat, to think it’s too hard, we’re not smart enough, or we’re not “math people.” We allow ourselves to be defeated by the difficulty. We understand that learning to play the violin requires making many, many hours of horrible screeching sounds, that learning to speak Chinese means making error after error and not being understood. But, somehow, when it comes to mathematics, we fear making mistakes. We imagine that there are “math people” to whom it is all transparent and, if it doesn’t come to us immediately, we must not be one of them. There are no such people. People who succeed in mathematics, like people who learn a musical instrument or a new language, spend a lot of time not understanding and feeling frustration. The path to understanding in mathematics necessarily involves, in the words of Steve Klee (4), being “willing to struggle.” It is strange that people do not understand this about mathematics when it is commonplace in essentially every other field of human endeavor. The people whose stories are in this book clearly understand this fact. Some of them, for example Lola Thompson (7) and Laura Taalman (8), avidly embrace the struggle, they seek out the experience of frustration and confusion because they have realized that persistence in the face of difficulty leads to the rewards of learning and growth.
This is a course that focuses first on collaboration and friendship amongst peers and then second on having fun. Math is just an excuse to do that and also learn something cool together along the way.
I loved math (and hated it sometimes too) because it provides valuable tools to our mind and helps make thinking itself easier and more powerful. There's the obvious ways in learning the basics of proof writing which helps us learn how to concisely and strongly present our argument for any true fact by building upon other true facts and axioms, which is analogous to how we logically deduce, argue and discuss anything in life. Similar to any other skills, practicing this skill will help train your brain with this infrastructure until it becomes second nature and your thinking and talking becomes clearer, more concise and cohesive.
The less obvious ways are by learning problems in real life whose solutions can be figured out with math more often than you'd think, and building an intuition that helps these small calculations become second nature so they can augment your thought process and take fewer cores of your brain while doing so to free up your thinking. Similar to how when you first learn chess you're constantly thinking about how each piece moves but once that becomes second nature your brain frees up to actualy think of the strategy and tactics while you play.
This course takes my favorite fun and practical topics from various courses I took at Carnegie Mellon, math concepts that more directly help with everyday life and thinking rather than learning integration and differentiation and memorizing formulae.