[Lex Computer & Tech Group/LCTG] Is physics useful?

[Jon Dreyer]

A good friend of mine was CEO of a high-tech company, the kind that 
recruited grads from Harvard, MIT, etc. He complained to me that the 
young recruits tended not to bother to guesstimate results, which led 
them to believe output from a computer, even if the result was obviously 
wrong to anyone who had bothered to guesstimate.

As a math tutor, I run into this all the time, and I figure it's good to 
learn good habits early. I find that most kids "learn" math as a 
specialized set of incantations, completely separate from normal 
intelligence and reasoning. These kids calculate the amount of fence 
needed for a rabbit pen (a favorite kind of problem in math books) in 
the thousands of feet or the thousandths of a foot, reading confidently 
from their calculators. I say something like, "Neither you nor I care 
about this rabbit pen. But imagine if you did, if this were your rabbit 
pen and you were buying the fence. What would you think about your 
answer?" Then we start talking about guesstimation as a tool for 
checking reasonableness.

-- 

Jon "The Sleep Of Reason Produces Monsters" Dreyer
Math Tutor/Computer Science Tutor <http://www.passionatelycurious.com>
Jon Dreyer Music <http://music.jondreyer.com>

On 9/23/23 9:33 AM, George Starkschall via LCTG wrote:
>
> The problem you have posed is a variation of the classic "Fermi 
> problem," which asked one to estimate the number of piano tuners in 
> Chicago.
>
> Let me recommend to you the book /Guesstimation/, which gives you 
> suggestions for solving this type of problem when you don't know 
> anything.  You can get the book from Amazon at
>
> Amazon.com: Guesstimation: Solving the World's Problems on the Back of 
> a Cocktail Napkin: 9780691129495: Weinstein, Lawrence, Adam, John A.: 
> Books 
> <https://www.amazon.com/Guesstimation-Solving-Worlds-Problems-Cocktail/dp/0691129495/ref=sr_1_1?crid=JX3NWHR6HDT0&keywords=guesstimation+book&qid=1695475669&sprefix=guesstimati%2Caps%2C157&sr=8-1>
>
> I used to teach first-year graduate students in a medical physics 
> program this material since most of them had never seen this type of 
> problem before.  They should have learned how to guesstimate much 
> earlier than grad school.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.toku.us/pipermail/lctg-toku.us/attachments/20230923/8ed4e078/attachment.htm>