this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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i think that if more people were exposed to advanced math there would be a reactionary trend of people going around and asking mathematicians “what is a number?”
sort of like the reactionary trend of pulling your kids out of school because Common Core has changed how math is taught so critical thinking and conceptual understanding is incorporated, rather than teaching math by rote memorization?
I'm shocked that the US only adopted this in 2009. I'm pretty sure my mum, who went to primary school in the 70s, recognized number lines when I was taught to use them on 2005ish. I'm having a hard time imagining how else you'd explain it.
look, we work very hard on being reactionary here in the U.S., we're a world leader in reactionary politics, and not teaching math well is crucial to keeping a vibrant ~~slave~~ worker population, otherwise they might start, you know, thinking for themselves
First you make them memorize single digit subtraction X - Y where X >= Y. Then you extend that to small double digit numbers.
Then you teach "borrowing". 351-213. Subtract the 1s column. Can't take 3 from 1, so borrow 10 from the 5 in the 10s column, making 11 in the 1s column and 4 in the 10s.
collapsed inline media
Definitely more clear, right?
So, I understand that the number line is a way to conceptualize relational distances between numbers, but in that example I'm struggling to see the relation between 57 where the line ends and 111, the answer. If you have insight, do you mind elaborating?
Edit: actually... Aren't the numbers they wrote in on the line WRONG? Why did they go down by 20 to 107, then by 10 to 57 arbitrarily? If you do 10 instead, then increment by 1 to 111... You get the answer. Did the person solve it wrong and put the right answer to get people outraged?
I think they were trying to demonstrate the second type of dot should be increments of 10 - the missed step in the original answer - and both messed it up (started with an increment of 20 as you pointed out) and extended it way beyond what was required for the problem at hand.
have you taught?
anytime you give people a new metaphorical hammer, they want to go around banging everything they can with it. then they get bored and forget about it.
pop psych is a great example. people love to go around diagnosing everyone with whatever new schema of diagnosis is popular and trendy.
Ehh not really its just to old if a concept for us to be appaled by that. Its not 15 century for imaginary numbers to cause riots.
I was going to make a comment about surreal numbers not being numbers. But I did a bit of fact checking and it looks like all of the values I was objecting to are not considered surreal numbers, but rather pseudo numbers.
I find this outrageous. Why can't ↑ be a number? What even is a number that would exclude it and leave in all of your so-called numbers?
Axioms. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_axioms
Can confirm. I was already struggling. But I just straight up refused to math with i
There is a slight difference though in that complex numbers are a part of math but gender isn't really a part of biology.
Also the mathematicians wouldn't decline to give an answer.
Gender isn’t part of biology (as a social construct) but the complexity of sex absolutely is.
Are you sure? I only minored in math, but even I would struggle to provide an answer to this. It would have to be something incredibly vague, like "a number is a mathematical object that has certain consistent properties relevant to the field of study." Because otherwise you get situations like "is infinity a number?" and you can't answer categorically, because usually it's not, but then you look at the transfinite numbers where you can indeed have omega-plus-one as a number. And someone asks if you can have an infinite number of digits to the left of the decimal place, and you say "well, not in the reals, but there are the P-adic numbers..." and folks ask if you can have an infinitely small number and you say "well, in the reals you can only have an arbitrarily small number, but in game theory there are the surreal numbers, where..."
So yeah, I'm not sure "what is a number" is even a math question. It's more a philosophy question, or sometimes a cognitive science question (like Lakoff and Nuñez's "Where Mathematics Comes From").
I believe that's what happens anytime they say that we probably shouldn't focus on memorizing a multiplication table, or try to teach anything in a way that puts more focus on understanding how numbers work than on symbolic memorization.
And that's like... Elementary school.
The whole new math everyone was complaining about is trying to do this. Granted teachers are human and flawed so sometimes it has not been implemented well, but it is aimed in the right direction.
I am absolutely going to start responding to questions / statements about gender with this concept though.