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Joined:  Apr 2009 
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Joined:  Apr 2009 
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DS brought home some math homework, which is to ask me the question, "what is math?" and write at least four sentences about my response. In the interest of educating the teacher, the class, and generally blowing any available minds, does anyone have any favorite quotes or particularly pithy commentary on the subject that I might include?    
 
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Joined:  Feb 2011 
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Math is...  a way of precisely representing observations and making predictions about the world around us, in a language that can be understood by anyone, anywhere.     
 
  
Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar.  And doesn't.
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Joined:  Jul 2012 
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Some people see math as simple, but when i am involved it becomes complex.
  Or, since we are past the first day of kindergarten and probably understand that 1 +1=2, we can skip ahead to page 372 of the Principica Mathematica and see how things get ineresting. 
 
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Joined:  Feb 2011 
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Maybe a joke? What did pi say to the square root of  negative two? Get REAL!!What did the square root of  negative two say in return? Be rational! Or you could go for snark: Did you mean this in a statistically significant sense?  Or were you seeking a qualitative response? 
Last edited by HowlerKarma; 08/23/13 08:00 PM. Reason: editing in the sign-- because that is just SO wrong without it. SO wrong. And yet it took someone else to point it out to me... {sigh}
 
 
  
Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar.  And doesn't.
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Joined:  Sep 2007 
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Hi there Q T π !       What's your sine?  
 
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Joined:  Jul 2012 
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A smart alec response: Since a question from math class is asking for the definition of a word and multiple sentences describing the definition received, I must intuit that math is a either a form of language study or some subset of journalism. 
 
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Joined:  Feb 2011 
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That response totally wins, btw. 
 
  
Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar.  And doesn't.
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Joined:  Mar 2013 
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Shouldn't it be the square root of the negative number?
  
 
  
Become what you are
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Joined:  Feb 2011 
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Shouldn't it be the square root of the negative number? yes.  Which just goes to show that I don't translate visual information very well into text. Nor edit very well when working back into symbolic form, clearly.  LOL.  
 
  
Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar.  And doesn't.
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Joined:  Dec 2012 
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Go ask your maths teacher. He or she should know. :-) 
 
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