Thanks, Tony P. The two most underrated scientists in popular science history are Kepler and James Clerk Maxwell. (Galileo is the most overrated.)
2025-07-22 05:42:21
Perhaps the greatest calculator, unmentioned in Devlin's article, was Kepler, who worked out his laws of planetary motion from Brahe's observations.
2025-07-21 07:35:11
I was taught using the School Mathematics Project, which seemed OK to me. But I may not be one of the "normal people".
I suggest that being able to divide accurately with pen and paper is now almost useless, whereas being able to divide approximately in one's head is useful for avoiding fat-finger errors. That is, the underpinnings have turned out to be more important than the algorithms.
2025-07-19 21:29:13
...the alphabet contributes somewhat to that difficulty...
I'm puzzled by this. I'm not good at languages, relative to my other skills, but switching alphabets - Cyrillic, Greek, Georgian... is trivial.
(I struggle with Hebrew, where some of the letters are just too alike.)
2025-07-19 21:23:45
India, with its huge population, already uses it because its people speak 5 mutually unintelligible native languages
Off the top of my head, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu. There are many others.
Thanks, Tony P. The two most underrated scientists in popular science history are Kepler and James Clerk Maxwell. (Galileo is the most overrated.)
Perhaps the greatest calculator, unmentioned in Devlin's article, was Kepler, who worked out his laws of planetary motion from Brahe's observations.
I was taught using the School Mathematics Project, which seemed OK to me. But I may not be one of the "normal people".
I suggest that being able to divide accurately with pen and paper is now almost useless, whereas being able to divide approximately in one's head is useful for avoiding fat-finger errors. That is, the underpinnings have turned out to be more important than the algorithms.
...the alphabet contributes somewhat to that difficulty...
I'm puzzled by this. I'm not good at languages, relative to my other skills, but switching alphabets - Cyrillic, Greek, Georgian... is trivial.
(I struggle with Hebrew, where some of the letters are just too alike.)
India, with its huge population, already uses it because its people speak 5 mutually unintelligible native languages
Off the top of my head, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu. There are many others.