Thursday, August 9, 2007

Another God-addled School Lesson: God's Math

At Good Math Bad Math, Mark Chu-Carroll has great article on a Baptist high school's explanation of a geometry class as being about studying "the nature of God", and how foolish that is. Mark's critique is especially interesting given that he is a religious reconstructionist Jew, hardly the evil atheist that critics of such views are so often painted as.

It is also a nice reminder of the universality of math. There is a reason some sci-fi writers emphasize the importance of having a mathematician in a group making first contact with an alien species. Physics formulas may differ, sociology will be quite different, but 13 is prime everywhere.

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