I’ve always been more of a word person than a math person, but I do enjoy experts who can translate their area of expertise into sharable concepts with roots in what matters for everyday life.
In this (fair warning, very substantive) video, one of the world’s best mathematicians shares some of the “extremely intuitive concepts” that underpin his forthcoming book on, what else? Math!
The world’s greatest mathematician explains 6 essential concepts of math – Big Think
If we didn’t have numbers, we would have to always speak poetically when trying to describe any situation, and it would always be a little bit imprecise, and the next person who’s communicating what you’re saying would get it slightly different. Numbers allow for precision. They are placeholders for concepts like quantity and size and magnitude, into very portable things that you can communicate to other people who may not have directly interacted with the objects you’re describing. And once you try to describe a very complicated scenario with many, many moving parts, you need numbers and everything else that’s born on top of that.
Do I like speaking poetically? I do, but a ten-page description of the state of the world is not terribly useful when it comes to calculating the price of gas.
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