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Friday, June 21, 2019

Outside the Box


Carpentry 'Magic': Draw a Circle... with a SQUARE?!

I'm reading The Outside by Ada Hoffman, a very spacey science fiction novel and it's pretty great. One of the first things that comes up is knowledge versus understanding. Geometry and algebra might be a good example. It is possible to learn the rules for manipulating algebraic equations and by applying these rules you can 'solve' an equation, but just because you solved it does not necessarily mean you understand what the equation means. If you took algebra in school you probably solved a couple zillion equations. I know I did, but it wasn't until I got into geometry that these equations started to make any kind of sense.




2 comments:

commoncents said...

President Trump trolls the internet - Trump 2088 ?

https://commoncts.blogspot.com/2019/06/president-trump-trolls-internet-trump.html

ps. could you please add CC to your blogroll?

Mad Jack said...

I didn't do well at Algebra, but I aced plane geometry without a problem - even though my high school geometry teacher disliked me and showed it. It wasn't until I struggled through calc 101 in college that I stumbled across the relationship between equations, formulas, and shapes.