In today’s session, I introduced a student to Vi Hart’s work (yay), we watched a brief Feynman clip on wave/particle duality (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stHkOpcDUig) and had a great discussion of the power of moving from observation of the world through interpretation to mathematics, then being able sometimes to reverse the process through mathematics and a DIFFERENT interpretation of the world to arrive at new insights.
We talked a bit about trans-base and non-base thought, and talked about Karate kid levels of Algebra:
1) Learning the manipulations you can do (“Wax on, Wax off”)
2) Algorthms, Heuristics, and generally knowing when to apply a given manipulation (Punch at Karate Kid…. see “Wax On” happen)
3) Learning how to break down a given complex problem into an Algebraic treatment (that final battle scene.)
4) Tuning your spidey senses for when an algebraic treatment could be useful / applicable. Okay… this one is more like Kane from Kung-Fu, but work with me.