[HN Gopher] Edo-period teens tackling math's toughest problems
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       Edo-period teens tackling math's toughest problems
        
       Author : benbreen
       Score  : 67 points
       Date   : 2024-06-07 20:00 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nippon.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nippon.com)
        
       | wizzwizz4 wrote:
       | > _"This problem is at or above the level expected of an
       | undergraduate math major, and it's startling to learn that a
       | sixteen-year-old girl was studying such difficult problems."_
       | 
       | This is the least startling part. I was repeatedly told "you
       | can't study that, it's postgraduate-level mathematics" by my
       | teachers, starting from primary school, when asking obvious
       | follow-up questions about the material we were covering. An
       | undergraduate mathematics course starts by covering basic
       | arithmetic, and doesn't progress much beyond that. Anything
       | beyond plugging numbers into memorised formulae, or reciting
       | taught proofs (perhaps slightly-adapted), is post-graduate level
       | stuff.
       | 
       | In our system, people are actively discouraged from pursuing
       | problems outside of a curriculum that's fairly standardised
       | across the Occident. Of _course_ , if they had a lay tradition of
       | mathematics that _wasn 't_ based on that curriculum, they
       | wouldn't have such barriers!
        
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       (page generated 2024-06-08 23:01 UTC)