Data Science team "BrainShturm"

I   often get asked about the purposes of doing mathematics. Why do mathematics when it is so difficult, so inaccessible and so unfriendly and uncool? Why do so many students hate and fail mathematics? Why do so many people feel comfortable with the fact that they cannot do mathematics or they were never good at mathematics? It is a well-known fact that Mathematics has a widespread public image as being difficult, cold, abstract, theoretical, ultra-rational but important. It also has an image of being remote and inaccessible to all but a few super-intelligent human beings with mathematical minds. This is of course not true, but it is because of this image that many people feel it is acceptable to be unsuccessful in mathematics. Many South Africans operating at a high level of competency in numeracy, graphicacy and computeracy in their professional work still feel comfortable declaring their inability in mathematics. I often hear respected people in our society saying, "I a...

What I like doing is taking something that other people thought was complicated and difficult to understand, and finding a simple idea, so that any fool – and, in this case, you – can understand the complicated thing. These simple ideas can be astonishingly powerful, and they are also astonishingly difficult to find. Many times it has taken a century or more for someone to have the simple idea; in fact it has often taken two thousand years, because often the Greeks could have had that idea, and they didn’t. People often have the misconception that what someone like Einstein did is complicated. No, the truly earthshattering ideas are simple ones. But these ideas often have a subtlety of some sort, which stops people from thinking of them. The simple idea involves a question nobody had thought of asking.