>>11939946I suppose there's no time for it, but in an ideal world every step of the way would be taught in context of its discovery or development. For example, the natural logarithm, which is simply presented as a wonderful mathematical fact, as it is. But why not take a week for this, and start with what they did before anyone had a concept of logarithms. Show how Napier was trying to solve a financial problem (I think) and how long it took for him and others to realize the power of the natural logarithm and then later on the usefulness of the common logarithm even before the invention of the slide rule.
Make students realize the amazing properties of the natural logarithm and why it works mathematically and how it fits into so many engineering and biological processes. I really doubt that the average Chad or Stacey would give a fuck as long as they get into the school of their choice, and the math guys would probably yawn since they already knew all this shit.
(It really pissed me off that they taught us about Taylor series long before we had any ability to understand how they work, so it looked like incomprehensible magic that this oddly perfect and simple sequence could calculate just about anything, from cosines to e^x or whatever).
tldr, I was a math god until I hit college and then realized I was a phony.
