this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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How often do you think most people need to know the advanced mathmatical properties of 3d space?
I think it is a shame that I'm a math student in university and needed to verify about such a thing. And if we're talking about people doing physics it might be even worst if they suck like me at 3d geometry.
Math students in university need to verify basically everything, that's a lot of what the career is about. I remember being humbled when asked to prove something as familiar to everybody as -1 * -1 = 1
hhhh abstract algebra and proof writing courses.
I mean, we live in it. It comes up in practice fairly often.
Let me guess, you're the kind of person who thinks we need to understand gravity to make use of it.
I really wish people like you could just have their mouths taped shut and their fingers glued together.
That's pretty mean, bro/brah/other.
Even in the days of catapults, rough formulas for the effects of gravity made them work a lot better. Knowing "it goes down" can do a bit, but not everything. If you somehow didn't even know that it would be useless.
Your misunderstanding comes from the type and amount of people that needed to have that knowledge.
For example, we don't need to know about ballistics to use a gun.
Do you have a source for this? I'm genuinely curious, considering Newton didn't show up until the 17th century.
We use plenty of simple geometry everyday, sure, but you don't need to be able to even understand what OP's example says to engage with the world. Like you don't need to provide a mathematical proof to put a shelf up properly.
Besides understanding what a projection is, I'm actually going to say that's all pretty important stuff to know. A point, forming a line between points, how to describe a plane and what perpendicular means.
If you want to do graphics projections suddenly become very important, but sure, you can explain carpentry without it. Although if you want to draft the solution first the concept will be at least relevant.
Kind of a separate issue yet. Even with OP's example, you can explain the solution in natural language pretty easily, but the obvious way to formally prove it would be with linear algebra.
How many people do you think are working in computer graphics? It's specialised knowledge, exactly the kind of thing that should be taught at university to the people it's relevent to.
It's not about how you phrase the solution, it's about needing the solution at all.
Yeah, agreed, but like I said most of this is not advanced or specialised.