Mathematics versus Applied Mathematics – Part -1
I have been reading a book “Beyond Infinity” by Eugenia Cheng and she writes “Mathematics suffers a strange burden of being required to be useful. This is not a burden placed on poetry or music or football” – I can completely understand and relate to this. This burden is increasing as we make greater advancement in technology. But the question is “should we teach only that part which can be applied to the real world or should we teach this beautifully logical subject and just keep pointing out the parts that can be applied to the real world?” For any mathematics teacher who is passionate about the subject the answer will be that we should take the middle path – teach the subject for the sake of the subject then during the journey digress slightly to show application to real world. Conrad Wolfram did a TED talk in which he mentioned using modeling of real world situation to teach mathematics as there are calculators and computers to do basic calculations – Well! yes but if we only do that, will we have the world that creates new technology or a world that can only use technology. So lets enjoy the music of mathematics while making use of the mathematical language to communicate.