Sussman, formal structures & education
Sep. 16th, 2005 10:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
guslVideo: Sussman - The Legacy of Computer Science suggests that formal languages, and the learning of formal structures makes us smarter: "When you can name it, you have power over it".
He also suggests that this same kind of approach is used by poets, and that teaching programming to children makes them smarter for all kinds of "symbolic skills" (i.e. the making of any compositional artifacts, whether music or physics theories).
He also exposes the awful notation in Lagrange's equations of mechanics (which reminds me that I once wasted a good opportunity to learn calculus of variations & differential geometry). Partly for this reason, he wrote "Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics" (online book), which rewrites all these equations in a well-typed and unambiguous way. Sussman is one the good ones! I wish I'd known this when I met him.
A lot of his ideas have to do with my current ideas about how algebraic knowledge can be applied in everyday life, etc. How inquiry can either come from the world ("is this accounted for in the theory?", "how can we make a theory to explain this?") or from the formalism ("what are the consequences of this abstractly-derived result in the real world?", which reminds me of "a theory searching for an application").
Everything is making me think about these ideas... My thesis is about modeling knowledge reuse in scientific reasoning. Fitelson gave a lecture about logical learning last week.
He also suggests that this same kind of approach is used by poets, and that teaching programming to children makes them smarter for all kinds of "symbolic skills" (i.e. the making of any compositional artifacts, whether music or physics theories).
He also exposes the awful notation in Lagrange's equations of mechanics (which reminds me that I once wasted a good opportunity to learn calculus of variations & differential geometry). Partly for this reason, he wrote "Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics" (online book), which rewrites all these equations in a well-typed and unambiguous way. Sussman is one the good ones! I wish I'd known this when I met him.
A lot of his ideas have to do with my current ideas about how algebraic knowledge can be applied in everyday life, etc. How inquiry can either come from the world ("is this accounted for in the theory?", "how can we make a theory to explain this?") or from the formalism ("what are the consequences of this abstractly-derived result in the real world?", which reminds me of "a theory searching for an application").
Everything is making me think about these ideas... My thesis is about modeling knowledge reuse in scientific reasoning. Fitelson gave a lecture about logical learning last week.