so I've been teaching Rust and programming in general to a couple of people and my mentee, who just started programming, expressed an interest in learning about algorithms, but they have no math background. and I started helping them with discrete math! I love teaching
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he got confused regarding all the symbols, so I explained it in terms of the truth value of signals, and he grokked it.
he also asked about universal and existential quantifiers! it's so lovely to see!
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to be clear, he didn't want to understand the applied side of algorithms, but wanted to understand the math behind it and how people actually arrive at them. I thought that teaching discrete math and putting him on that road will be beneficial either way
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but I wouldn't start introducing the math background to a beginner unless they expressed an explicit interest in it, because if someone wants to just program, they don't have to have it. one of my very strong beliefs is that you have to just do a lot of programming to get better.
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anyway I love teaching and I really want to teach one day for money at an university level, thank you for coming to my TED talk
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what's interesting is that in most estonian textbooks the existential and universal quiantifiers are explained in such a dry way that it's no wonder he didn't understand it. they just throw the definitions into the text and don't explain it.
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it's amazing how much easier it is to think of it as a statement for "there exists" and "(for) every..." with examples
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Oooh, if you have got to generic functions, then you have an example of universal quantifiers in Rust! Although you can't disentangle them from 'type functions' so it might be a bit confusing… (ie. there's no way to write `<T, ...> -> U` on its own).
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yeah but I think I also need to go over functions, domains, and codomains with him first because right now he's confused over notation where different quantifiers have been applied to a variable proposition right after one another
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Heh, tbh I'm not actually famialar with the issues with teaching the logic notation, although I hear it can be a challenge to those quantifiers. I mainly learned logic etc. via Agda, Idris and Lean etc. 😳
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this is also why teaching is so great because suddenly you meet people who aren't used to understanding things like you do, and you have to understand what they're not getting, and figure out examples that work specifically for them
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Yeah! I'm not the best at teaching, but that's sort of why I liked co-working before the pandemic times - I could try out different explanations of the weird stuff I was doing on people to figure out different approaches that worked. I really miss that. 😔
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Like, 'lambdas being the way to construct a forall/implication' helped me a bunch. Along with the logical connectives etc.
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interestingly I couldn't understand any of it before I started formally studying math. I just glossed over it because I didn't understand it, and I wasn't interested in it
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