Originally Posted By: kallog

Not quite sure how well the meaning is communicated, but I would have shared that tie with thousands of other students


I knew there would have been a big number, but I didn't realize it was so many. I also shared (tied) with (I think) a couple dozen students. Still, it is an outstanding accomplishment. OTOH, it's probably good to state the provisos in case anyone tries to get through this thread.

And the conclusion stands. There's no evidence that either of us didn't pay attention in math class, and some reasonable evidence to the contrary.

My argument to Paul is not "I have master's degree, etc. in math so I must be right."

My argument is that "I have a master's degree in math, etc.; this seems inconsistent with Paul's assertion that I didn't pay attention in math class." (That was only a follow up, tangential point.)

My main argument is that everyone who uses math, INCLUDING the people who derived the formulas that Paul is applying use it in the same way that you and I do. Now that isn't what makes us right. BUT

1) Why use any of the formulas since they were derived by people he thinks are incompetent at math?

1a) If the formulas were derived by bad math, why use them?

2) You guys are wasting time talking about your examples when there is a much more fundamental disagreement. That's not exactly correct ... only you guys can tell whether it's worth your own time, but it SEEMS to me that you can't ever reach agreement when you have such fundamentally different understandings.

3) Some of these things are counter-intuitive (at first), so I don't have an issue with Paul's disagreement. In fact, I had different (but similar) questions about math. These are the kinds of questions that HS students OUGHT to be asking in their math classes, but often don't, because most of them are memorizing.

3a) HOWEVER, when I had *my* issues, I didn't say that everyone else was wrong. Instead I pored over the book, worked problems, consulted other books, interrogated the teachers. I asked, "Why DO they think about it that way?" Sometimes the other kids got irritated (and some of the lower level teachers did too), but generally the teachers in the higher math classes understood my difficulties and helped me navigate my intellectual impasses.