Can Mathematicians Speak English? 🙂

Back in my pre-Missouri State days, I briefly wrote a community education column for the local Branson paper.  I recently re-discovered one of those columns.  It had two quote excerpts that I think will be fun to re-share.  I hope you’ll find one of them uplifting and encouraging.  And I highly suspect you’ll enjoy the other one way too much!

Vision for math classrooms

Back then, there had been a statewide education course that was offered to math teachers.  The course had funding from McConnell-Douglas in St. Louis, and was hosted by UMKC and UMC.  Because of my brief involvement as one of the guest instructors, I was able to see a copy of one of the end-of-class papers that had a comment from a former student.  Here is a slightly edited quote from that paper: 
“If you build IT, they will come.  What is the IT we are building?  IT is an environment: a mathematically stimulating environment where it is safe to ‘play’ with ideas and where the correct answer isn’t always the final goal; where powerful mathematical ideas are not taught in isolation nor saved for Friday dessert; where fun isn’t an indication that the mathematics has gone awry, and where the understanding of math and its power is our goal, not just an added plus.
“(This) mathematical environment values a balance of estimation, mental computations, paper-and-pencil algorithm, and mechanical computations, (and the teachers there) no longer merely dispense knowledge but facilitate discoveries by our students.”
An inspiring vision, I hope you’d agree.  On the other hand, I suspect that may still seem pie-in-the-sky to some, and I can just hear the “that’s sure not how it was in MY math classrooms!”  And, depending on your age, I further suspect you’d be right.
But, looking back on that quote now, I’m delighted to report that the vision is becoming a reality!  Not as fast as we’d like (you can’t turn a battleship on a dime!), but it is happening.  Enlightened teachers are making it happen and parents are slowly understanding and supporting it.  It’s exciting.
Now, on a much lighter side, how about a laugh at the expense of mathematicians?

Can mathematicians speak English?

Back in that afore-mentioned previous life, a former (non-mathematician) colleague dropped by one day, bringing this with him, probably to needle me.  He discovered it in an issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. (Details upon on request).
It seems that a Columbia University psychologist, Stanley Schachter, had decided that “historians and other professors in the humanities tend to use ‘uh’ and ‘um’ a lot more often in their lectures than do their colleagues in the science and social sciences” not because they’re inarticulate, but because that have a larger vocabulary from which to choose!
Now that’s a most interesting interpretation, it seemed to me, not to mention a tad self-serving.  But I digress . . .
To test his idea, he and other colleagues counted the number of different words used in lectures and articles by professions in a variety of fields.  Here’s the fun part:

“The distinction of having the most limited vocabulary goes to mathematicians.  In fact, when it came to measuring words used in published material, mathematicians had to be eliminated from the study because they tended to write in formulae rather than English.  ‘They appear not to use words as we know them,’ the authors observed.”
Not being a publishing research mathematician, perhaps I can dodge that barb.  Either way, I’m not sure I have words to respond to that, so we’ll call it a day.