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alex

@ve-nus-as-a-boy

20 | they/them
“There is a myth that math is about getting the right answer, but that’s a very ingressive approach to it; a more congressive approach, and one that is much more prevalent in higher-level math, is that it’s about how you construct rigorous arguments to show that something is an answer. A congressive approach says it’s more important to learn that discipline than to learn the answer; it’s also a more transferrable skill. Math detractors complain that they never have to use school math in their daily lives, which is probably true if the whole focus of their school math was on specific answers about things like triangles and quadratic equations. Unfortunately, math as presented in school is largely the ingressive aspects: getting the right answer, following rules that are imposed on you, a proliferation of facts that you’re supposed to know, and solving problems. If instead the math were congressive — about building arguments, seeing relationships between things, and understanding contexts in which different things are true — then the math would be much more relevant to daily life and much more about genuine mathematical ability.”

— Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician’s Manifesto for Rethinking Gender