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Comment by Agingcoder | Hacker News Reader

I like your idea.

I was schooled in abstract 20th century math - indeed YouTube is the opposite, and it’s a good thing.

One of my math teachers was once talking to Jean Dieudonné https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Dieudonn%C3%A9

who was part of the Bourbaki group and asked him why on earth he insisted on inflicting raw dry theory to the world with no intuition , when his day job involved drawing ideas all day long !

Edit: interestingly enough, one of my colleagues thinks very strongly that intuition should not be shared, and the path to intuition should be walked by everyone so that they ´ Make their own mental images ´. I guess that there’s a tradeoff between making things accessible, and deeply understood, but I don’t know what to make of his opinion.

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The ‘make thier own mental models’ vs sharing/providing full information is difficult.

‘Make thier own model’ of the domain can lead to deeper understanding but takes time and may lead to different (possibly incorrect) understanding of the issues and complexities. If not reviewed with others.

Providing full information upfront to a person can be quicker but lead to a superficial knowledge.

I think that it comes down to whether that deeper knowledge is directly needed for the main task. Can I get by with an superficial (leaky) abstraction and concentrate on the main job.

> interestingly enough, one of my colleagues thinks very strongly that intuition should not be shared, and the path to intuition should be walked by everyone so that they ´ Make their own mental images ´. I guess that there’s a tradeoff between making things accessible, and deeply understood, but I don’t know what to make of his opinion.

If the objective is to advance mathematics instead of making it accessible, then this is a somewhat reasonable position. The mathematical statements that a person can come up with is often a direct product of their mental image. If everyone has the same image, everyone comes up with similar mathematical statements. For this reason you want to avoid that everyone has the same picture. Forcing everyone to start with a clean canvas increases the chance that there is diversity in the images. Maybe someone finds a new image, that leads to new mathematical statements. At least that's the idea. One could also argue that it just leads to blank canvases everywhere.

Do you know how Dieudonné answered?

On foundations we believe in the reality of mathematics, but of course, when philosophers attack us with their paradoxes, we rush to hide behind formalism and say 'mathematics is just a combination of meaningless symbols,'... Finally we are left in peace to go back to our mathematics and do it as we have always done, with the feeling each mathematician has that he is working with something real. The sensation is probably an illusion, but it is very convenient.

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