Connections
Oct. 15th, 2019 05:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowLast week in Linear Algebra, we started in on abstraction - general vector spaces and the like. I made some brief comments on the concept of dimension - not the precise idea used in linear algebra, but a more general one - and one of the students asked about visualizing four-dimensional objects with three-dimensional images. I went off on a brief digression about tesseracts and their three- and two-dimensional shadows, drawing a picture of the latter.
Today, after class, another student came up to me and said he'd been thinking about what I'd said, in the context of Plato's Cave. It's a fairly obvious connection to draw, if you know (on the one hand) enough mathematics and (on the other) enough history of philosophy; but it's still nice to see a student drawing cross-subject connections.
I suggested that he read Abbott's _Flatland_; it's not quite in line with what he was talking about, but he might find it interesting.
Today, after class, another student came up to me and said he'd been thinking about what I'd said, in the context of Plato's Cave. It's a fairly obvious connection to draw, if you know (on the one hand) enough mathematics and (on the other) enough history of philosophy; but it's still nice to see a student drawing cross-subject connections.
I suggested that he read Abbott's _Flatland_; it's not quite in line with what he was talking about, but he might find it interesting.
