On 2 May, 2007, at 6:55 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
On May 2, 2007, at 6:50 PM, ravi wrote:
I have no idea who McGuffey is, and I know that Lacan is vilified by
the anti-pomo crowd. Irrespective of that, I believe you are missing
out one of the most fundamentally beautiful human activities by
dismissing (from your scope of knowledge) the doing of mathematics
prematurely!
I'm not dismissing it at all - I even use it from time to time,
though mostly in a vulgar way. I stopped studying math after the
first semester of college calculus. I admire people who can
understand it with any depth; I'm just not one of them.
I did not mean that you are dismissing mathematics, but that you are
dismissing the possibility of your making sense of the workings of
it. You are being a bit too modest -- I studied math at undergraduate
and graduate level, but there are mathematical things you can do and
talk about that I would not understand -- at least not any longer.
And perhaps that is "vulgar math" by some token, but even within the
math community, the divide is not just between pure and applied math,
but also between math and meta-math (the latter often suffering the
disadvantage). Or perhaps I am being too immodest, though, in my
defence, I do not claim that I understand math to any depth ;-).
McGuffey is the name of legendary 19th century readers for American
schoolkids.
Ah!
--ravi
