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Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Apr 05 2020 at 10:13):Hey folks, one often talks about applications of math to real life problems, but I've never heard about applications of 'mathematical thinking' in real life, or, dually, principles from real life giving insight in math.
I'll start with the example that kicked it for me. Sometimes in math it's just too hard to attack a problem directly, you need instead to make a long detour, building a theory around it, and eventually its solution will unfold effortlessly before your eyes. This latter 'problem solving' strategy is famously due to Grothendieck, he called it 'the rising sea' (even though, tbh, I always found his metaphor quite odd).
So it came to my mind that this way of tackling a big problem might also be effective in real life. Some social issues, e.g. patriarchalism, are so big that any attempt to tackle them directly is pointless, or even worse, they might backfire. People tend to react harshly if you tell them they are doing something wrong, especially if they didn't think about it before, and they have no real good reason to continue doing it. They feel ashamed, and they get angry at you. Silly, but humane.
Therefore, instead of going around yelling at people, sometimes it might be better to 'be patient', and try to develop a good context in which to frame the critique, and let the rising sea do its thing
Idk if it makes sense to you people. I'm also curious about examples going the other way around, i.e. real life episodes/mindsets that inspired some good insight in math
Fabrizio Genovese (Apr 05 2020 at 10:33):This is a nice insight. Another example of math applied to real life may be the way Extinction Rebellion shapes its protests. They use mathematical reasoning to optimize organization and increase results
Fabrizio Genovese (Apr 05 2020 at 10:34):Anyway there are a lot of real life principles giving insights in math, especially when you look at classical physics
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Apr 05 2020 at 10:39):Fabrizio Genovese said:
This is a nice insight. Another example of math applied to real life may be the way Extinction Rebellion shapes its protests. They use mathematical reasoning to optimize organization and increase results
This is cool, I didn't know about it. Do you have a link to share?
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Apr 05 2020 at 10:40):Fabrizio Genovese said:
Anyway there are a lot of real life principles giving insights in math, especially when you look at classical physics
True! Physics is great at this. But pure math? It should!
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Apr 05 2020 at 10:41):A very good principle to apply IRL is the Yoneda philosophy ("tell me who your friends are...") , although it's hardly been invented by math
Fabrizio Genovese (Apr 05 2020 at 11:04):Matteo Capucci said:
Fabrizio Genovese said:
This is a nice insight. Another example of math applied to real life may be the way Extinction Rebellion shapes its protests. They use mathematical reasoning to optimize organization and increase results
This is cool, I didn't know about it. Do you have a link to share?
Not right now, but they are really famous for this. Googling "Exinction Rebellion Machine Learning" will probably give you something
Jules Hedges (Apr 05 2020 at 11:31):I briefly thought about trying to look at Extinction Rebellion's logistics problems with compositional game theory and related categorical things. But I decided it would be unhelpful to the point of being dangerous, they need solutions that work yesterday, rather than some unproven thing that still needs 10 years of work to be practical