On Thursday we talked about the relationship between
reality, information and context. I feel
that that discussion is relevant here as well. “Mathematics is a language.” So
says Josiah Willard Gibbs. Even more so, math is considered a universal
language. Numbers are similar if not the same in every language. The class
discussion on Thursday was heavily centered on the translation from one
language to another, of the speaker, to the drums, to Morse code, etc. However,
when the mode is the same no matter the language of the speaker, math being the
mode, then the same message can be delivered and received. There are very few
conceptual ideas to grasp in mathematics to confuse the receiver of a message.
I was recently watching a Korean drama on Netflix, and came
across this tutoring scene in Episode 4, of Playful Kiss. In the scene Baek
Seung Jo is explaining the equation F=ma. This equation is used in Physics and
makes perfect sense to me that F=force, m=mass, and a=acceleration. It wasn’t
until I was watching the scene that I realized that although the speaker says, “eff”
for the sound that F makes, that letter most likely doesn’t exist in that same
form, and the likelihood that the word “force” begins with and “F” in Korean
even more unlikely.
Whole video can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id9kNX7XDTI
I think these ties greatly into culture. Who is it that makes the rules and the equations? Clearly in this physics equation it was an English speaker who created the formula. I think it is statistically probable that there are mathematicians from other languages.
I think these ties greatly into culture. Who is it that makes the rules and the equations? Clearly in this physics equation it was an English speaker who created the formula. I think it is statistically probable that there are mathematicians from other languages.
I think that our mathematical equations say a lot about who
is “in charge” of the message. But what is it that we are calculating and
quantifying. I believe that we are calculating everything. Right now my word
processor is calculating the length of this post, and the grammatical correctness.
As societies we turn letters, words, figures, ideas, and concepts all into
numbers and equations. Mathematics offers answers, and in a world driven by
answers, it is easy to see why math is used everywhere.
I found this post interesting because I’ve come to realize that the “universal” language of mathematics is far less universal than most people care to know. I had an interesting conversation with my father (a Polish immigrant) regarding this subject and I feel that a lot of what he told me coincides with what you were talking about.
ReplyDeleteAlthough my father’s education was mostly the same in Europe as it is here in America, one thing he mentioned was that after coming to America he had trouble learning mathematics solely because of the language barrier. Words like, denominator, divide, factor, square root, and countless other vocabulary are all quite different in Polish then they are in English (and every other language I would imagine). This made learning math for my father very difficult simply because he felt that he had to start all over again.
To further explain my point that math isn’t as universal of a language as we may think, in 1999 the Mars Climate Orbiter disintegrated into space dust due to a simple unit miscommunication between the two engineering teams behind the mission. NASA, writing their code in imperial units, and Lockheed, writing their code in metric units, threw nearly 328 million dollars down the drain simply because the two teams assumed one unit of measurement would be used over another.
I think it’s pretty interesting to see just how similar learning the language of math is compared to everything else. Just like with learning any other language, there are things that get lost in translation, misinterpreted, and ultimately may lead to lots of confusion. And sometimes it leads towards disaster!