Fire and Brimstone
Yesterday I attended the weekly mathematics colloqium which this week was a joint venture with biology. The topic was the rise of qualitative methods in biology(and particularly differential equations). Part of the talk was quite enjoyable. Although not particularly new, the recoverage of attractors, equilibrium and all that was rather refreshing after the material I have been dealing with lately.
Unfortunately the speaker was in my opinion, highly condescending and trying to spark controversy. He argued that quantitative methods(closed form solutions et al) are arguably useless for any real system as closed forms can be hard or impossible to find. So far not too bad I suppose, though I wouldn’t quite go as far as that. Then he seemed to get carried away. He started arguing for instance that biology students shouldn’t take calculus, and that we should replace their current calculus courses with a class that basically boils down to numerical integration and graphing and then observing how stuff behaves. While I agree those methods are useful, the argument that we need to completely rid biology students of the base on which everything is built? Absolutely nonsense. His argument is that biology students hate math, so why teach them how to calculate derivatives, integrals etc.
He of course rationalized this by saying that if they needed to actually solve the equations they could then just go to a mathematician. Doesn’t this seem a bit condescending to biology students, that math is something they can meddle in, but leave the real work to the mathematicians? Also aren’t we depriving them of the beauty of a large section of mathematics by doing this? Also what if they do eventually want to proceed with their research. They then have the choice of going back and having a mathematician hold their hand through everything, or going back and learning calculus anyways. Also the argument that biology students can’t and shouldn’t do calculus is highly offensive. Several good friends of mine are biologists and show quite an aptitude for mathematics.
Thankfully I wasn’t the only one offended with a large portion of the argument and several of our mathematicians took him up on the argument. At least one faculty member walked out, after commenting that the speaker was either trying to be overly controversial, or was just a plain idiot. One could almost imagine the fights between Lagrange and Fourier in their head.
Well back to my own meager research(Perceptual objective audio quality metrics). Looks like this afternoon holds another interesting talk.
* Graduate Student Seminar: 4:00 pm, SH 235. Joel
Lucero-Bryan: An Introduction to Modal Logic and Various
Semantics.
Ooh and looks like what could be another interesting talk tommorrow(If I can sneak in and have it done before my DSP test)
Topology Seminar: 2:30 pm, SH 235. Ted Stanford: The Game
of Hex, the Jordan Curve Theorem, and the Brouwer Fixed Point
Theorem
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