SORRY STATE: MATHS IN SCHOOLS..

HISTORICAL MATHS

maths a subject ... umm i think its more of a language whose importance cannot be undermined.. and a language which cannnot be understood without the proper desire to learn it just like the other languages. well still english, hindi, french spanish, etc are some of t he languages that are spoken all around the globe but only by a certain group of people generally those groups where people have been speaking that language for time immemorial.. but i guess maths is the only language which is written if not spoken by everybody, a language that has the capacity in it to bind the people of this world together...

this is what w t gowers a famous mathematician himself had to sat about the importance of maths

It is with some disbelief that I stand here and prepare to address this gathering on the

subject of the importance of mathematics. For a start, it is an extraordinary honour to

be invited to give the keynote address at a millennium meeting in Paris. Secondly, giving

a lecture on the signi cance of mathematics demands wisdom, judgment and maturity,

and there are many mathematicians far better endowed than I am with these qualities,

including several in this audience. I hope therefore that you will understand that my

thoughts are not fully formed: if I had been asked to speak on this subject ve years ago,

I would have given a completely di erent lecture, and I am con dent that in ve years'

time it would again have changed.

If I fail to convince you that mathematics is important and worthwhile, I will be letting

down the mathematical community, and also letting down Mr Clay, whose generosity has

made this event possible and is bene ting mathematics in many other ways as well.

Unfortunately, if one surveys in a super cial way the vast activity of mathematicians

around the world, it is easy to come away with the impression that mathematics is not

actually all that important. The percentage of the world's population, or even of the

world's university-educated population, who could accurately state a single mathematical

theorem proved in the last fty years, is small, and smaller still if Fermat's last theorem is

excluded. If you ask a mathematician to explain what he or she works on, you will usually

be met with a sheepish grin and told that it is not possible to do so in a short time. If

you ask whether this mysteriously complicated work has practical applications (and we all

get asked this from time to time), then there are various typical responses, none of them

immediately impressive.

One is the line taken by the famous Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy, who

was perfectly content, indeed almost proud, that his chosen eld, Number Theory, had

no applications, either then or in the foreseeable future. For him, the main criterion of

mathematical worth was beauty.

I don't think this philosophical question has been satisfactorily answered, but we can

be grateful that in our world it is possible to use simple mathematical models. These can

describe, or even explain, the great complexities of physics and to a lesser extent the other

sciences. Once again, complexity arises from simplicity, and, once again, beauty reveals

itself to be important. Thanks to this piece of good fortune, we can be con dent that

mathematicians, if they are given the freedom to pursue the subject that gives them so

much pleasure, will continue to produce a body of work that is important in every sense

of the word.

  

well but why i am writing this post has got nothing to do with the importance of maths....( despite of hatever is written above).. 


i write this one because of the  sorry state in which maths is being taught in schools.. its basically more of mugging and none of learning ... today i just came across a school which focuses on solving the same questions a hundred times over and makin them remember the answers to those questions.. and to think that the schoo is a reputed school in patna, my city.. i feel kinda ashamed..

maths according me ought to be practised.. it is a way of attaining enormous joy.. where every single question possesses a challange before you.. its a subject that makes you ready to face the challanges that life will throw in front of yoou .. its a medium to ge ready for the future..
and considering that it is happening in a school that boasts of giving state toppers every year gets me worried about the state of education. 
what i feel is that it is not only the schools fault, the education system is to be blamed as they have provided an easy alternative for students by repeating the same questions year after year... sadly such  shortcuts arent avavilable in future and the children will eb the one to suffer...

when i was going through the preious year question papers , i realised that the same questions with the same data was repeated. the maths paper is now more of hisory than of maths ....