Variable-speed learning

When I was in college, one of the professors seemed to lecture at a sort of quadratic pace, maybe even an exponential pace.

He would proceed very slowly at the beginning of the semester, so slowly that you didn’t see how he could possibly cover the course material by the end. But his pace would gradually increase to the point that he was going very quickly at the end. And yet the pace increased so smoothly that you were hardly aware of it. By understanding the first material thoroughly, you were able to go through the latter material quickly.

If you’ve got 15 weeks to cover 15 chapters, don’t assume the optimal pace is to cover one chapter every week.

I often read technical books the way the professor mentioned above lectured. The density of completely new ideas typically decreases as a book progresses. If your reading pace is proportional to the density of new ideas, you’ll start slow and speed up.

The preface may be the most important part of the book. Some books I’ve only read the preface and felt like I got a lot out of the book.

The last couple chapters of technical books can often be ignored. It’s common for authors to squeeze in something about their research at the end of a book, even if its out of character with the rest of the book.

Off by one character

There was a discussion on Twitter today about a mistake calculus students make:

\frac{d}{dx}e^x = x e^{x-1}

I pointed out that it’s only off by one character:


The first equation is simply wrong. The second is correct, but a gross violation of convention, using x as a constant and e as a variable.


It’s like this other thing except …

One of my complaints about math writing is that definitions are hardly ever subtractive, even if that’s how people think of them.

For example, a monoid is a group except without inverses. But that’s not how you’ll see it defined. Instead you’ll read that it’s a set with an associative binary operation and an identity element. A module is a vector space, except the scalars come from a ring instead of a field. But the definition from scratch is more than I want to write here. Any time you have a sub-widget or a pre-widget or a semi-widget, it’s probably best to define the widget first.

I understand the logical tidiness of saying what a thing is rather than what it is not. But it makes more pedagogical sense to describe the difference between a new concept and the most similar familiar concept. And the nearest familiar concept may have more structure rather than less.

Suppose you wanted to describe where a smaller city is by giving directions from larger, presumably more well known city, but you could only move east. Then instead of saying Ft. Worth is 30 miles west of Dallas, you’d have to say it’s 1,000 miles east of Phoenix.

Writers don’t have to chose between crisp logic and good pedagogy. They can do both. They can say, for example, that a pre-thingy is a thingy without some property, then say “That is, a pre-thingy satisfies the following axioms: …”

Student’s future, teacher’s past





Group projects




Permutations and tests

Suppose a test asks you to place 10 events in chronological order. Label these events A through J so that chronological order is also alphabetical order.

If a student answers BACDEFGHIJ, then did they make two mistakes or just one? Two events are in the wrong position, but they made one transposition error. The simplest way to grade such a test would be to count the number of events that are in the correct position. Is this the most fair way to grade?

If you decide to count how many transpositions are needed to correct a student’s answer, do you count any transposition or only adjacent transpositions? For example, if someone answered JBCDEFGHIA, then transposing the A and the J is enough to put the results in order. But reversing the first and last event seems like a bigger mistake than reversing the first two events. Counting only adjacent transpositions would penalize this mistake more. You would have to swap the J with each of the eight letters between J and A. But it hardly seems that answering JBCDEFGHIA is eight times worse than answering BACDEFGHIJ.

Maybe counting transpositions is too much work. So we just go back to counting how many events are in the right place. But then suppose someone answers JABCDEFGHI. This is completely wrong since every event is in the wrong position. But the student obviously knows something, since the relative order of nearly all of the events is correct. From one perspective there was only one mistake: J comes last, not first.

What is the worst possible answer? Maybe getting the order exactly backward? If you have an odd number of events, then getting the order backward means one event is in the right place, and so that doesn’t receive the lowest possible score.

This is an interesting problem beyond grading exams. (As for grading exams, I’d suggest simply not using questions of this type on an exam.) In manufacturing, how serious a mistake is it to reverse two consecutive components versus two distant components? You could also ask the same question when comparing DNA sequences or other digital signals. The best way to assign a distance between the actual and desired sequence would depend entirely on context.

Reading equations forward and backward



For example, Euler’s reflection formula says



When we see Einstein’s equation

E = mc2





Pedantic arithmetic rules

Generations of math teachers have drilled into their students that they must reduce fractions. That serves some purpose in the early years, but somewhere along the way students need to learn reducing fractions is not only unnecessary, but can be bad for communication. For example, if the fraction 45/365 comes up in the discussion of something that happened 45 days in a year, the fraction 45/365 is clearer than 9/73. The fraction 45/365 is not simpler in a number theoretic sense, but it is psychologically simpler since it’s obvious where the denominator came from. In this context, writing 9/73 is not a simplification but an obfuscation.

Simplifying fractions sometimes makes things clearer, but not always. It depends on context, and context is something students don’t understand at first. So it makes sense to be pedantic at some stage, but then students need to learn that clear communication trumps pedantic conventions.

Along these lines, there is a old taboo against having radicals in the denominator of a fraction. For example, 3/√5 is not allowed and should be rewritten as 3√5/5. This is an arbitrary convention now, though there once was a practical reason for it, namely that in hand calculations it’s easier to multiply by a long decimal number than to divide by it. So, for example, if you had to reduce 3/√5 to a decimal in the old days, you’d look up √5 in a table to find it equals 2.2360679775. It would be easier to compute 0.6*2.2360679775 by hand than to compute 3/2.2360679775.

As with unreduced fractions, radicals in the denominator might be not only mathematically equivalent but psychologically preferable. If there’s a 3 in some context, and a √5, then it may be clear that 3/√5 is their ratio. In that same context someone may look at 3√5/5 and ask “Where did that factor of 5 in the denominator come from?”

A possible justification for rules above is that they provide standard forms that make grading easier. But this is only true for the simplest exercises. With moderately complicated exercises, following a student’s work is harder than determining whether two expressions represent the same number.

One final note on pedantic arithmetic rules: If the order of operations isn’t clear, make it clear. Add a pair of parentheses if you need to. Or write division operations as one thing above a horizontal bar and another below, not using the division symbol. Then you (and your reader) don’t have to worry whether, for example, multiplication has higher precedence than division or whether both have equal precedence and are carried out left to right.






Related post: Psychological encapsulation

[1] See Yeats’ poem The Second Coming:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.


Elementary vs Foundational







Related: Advanced or just obscure?