selling math to geology students... or not

[tectonite]

I'm currently reading two books that have been making me think about geologists' attitudes toward math. One is Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can't Predict the Future, by Orrin Pilkey and Linda Pilkey-Jarvis. It's an argument about the dangers of misusing math to find simplistic answers in applied geologic problems. The second is

Comments

[rabidsamfan]

It sounds like the Pilkey's are echoing a complaint that came up, almost as an aside in Why Things Break, where Eberhart points out that it's easier to get funding to write a computer program to model something way past the point of measurability than it is to get money to do the measuring.

Or for that matter, they might be echoing Algebra Unplugged - one of my favorite books to hand kids who are fighting math. In the early part of the book it gets explained that math is a kind of a game which can be used to describe the world, but if you forget that it's a game you start trying to apply answers that don't fit

[tectonite]

Maybe that's what you need for your Advanced Structure class. The comic book version!

:D The textbook that I use for my regular structural geology class actually does include a lot of comics. Comics (and stories about the author's brother) make the books very entertaining - there's a reason why I use it, and why it's the most popular textbook in the subdiscipline.

And your sense about math is really very typical. There was an illustration associated with the passage I quoted, and it helped... up to a point. But the drawing wasn't that great - I could figure it out, but I had to use my understanding of the reading. I don't think it would have helped a student as much as it needed to. And after that passage, the authors suddenly jump to the final version of the equation relating latitude and longitude to the Cartesian coordinates on the map, and at that point I wasn't exactly sure what variables were where on the diagram. And if I had trouble with it... well, my students would be totally stuck. Alas.

Math and Geology

[gamoonbat]

I found you through a post on theclimateblog. This is very interesting and both of these books have now moved to the top of my reading list. I gathered that the Pilkeys may have overstated their case due to dislike for shoreline change models.

Re: Math and Geology

[tectonite]

I haven't actually finished the Pilkey's book - I decided I wanted to work my way through the structure book first, but I've stopped to work through problem sets a few times, so it's been slow going. But, yes, the next three chapters of the Pilkeys' book are about various models dealing with sea level, shorelines, and beaches.