Myth emati CS Christos H. Papadimitriou UC Berkeley : christos

Myth ematiCS

Christos H. Papadimitriou

UC Berkeley

: christos

ITICSE, July 2,2003 2

mythematics noun, plural but plural&singular in use, nlgsm/slpn

from Gr myth (= story that serves to unfold a world view or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon) more correct form: mytheumatics

1 a : the use of story-telling in the teaching of computer science and mathematics

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“there is no idea worth explaining that cannot be explained by a good story” Anonymous

• narrative as epistemic modality• why MythematiCS?• three modes (historical/biographical context,

illustration, embedding)

• programming vs. story-telling• a story

plan

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narrative knowledge

• Narrative Psychology (J. S. Bruner, introductory book by M. L. Crossley)

“a viewpoint within Psychology interested in how humans understand their world and their experience by constructing stories and assimilating stories by others”

• Bruner: Two modes of thinking: Paradigmatic (logico-deductive, classificatory) vs. Narrative (storied)

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narrative knowledge (cont.)

• Narrative richness considered a precondition for the self (and vice-versa)

• Stories are interesting• For 99% of the course of humanity stories

appear to have been the principal mode of social knowledge and education

• The neurology of narrative: episodic memory and the hippocampus

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why MythematiCS?

• Incredibly, many people do not find CS interesting.

• Math: much-much more so ( Doxiadis embedding)

• Even if we thought that there are enough people who find CS fascinating, it is important to expand/diversify our span.

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why MythematiCS? (cont.)

• Story-telling is alive and well precisely in places and cultures that are in dire need of CS and math education

• Multimodality and variety is desirable in education

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the three modes

• Historical/biographical context is probably already used in math and CS education (e.g., Archimedes, Galois, Ada, Turing)

• Artefact stories, too: Eniac, OS360, programming languages, crypto, grep, internet, open source ( steve weber source)

• Stories of authorship, rivalry and scooping

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narrative illustration

• E.g., exponential growth, depth-first search• Incompleteness: A play and a theorem (later)• Natural (hi)story: Dijkstra’s algorithm as wave

propagation in a wire model• Low-intensity narrative illustration: word

problems, evocative terminology (e.g., traveling salesman problem, taxicab rip-off problem, two-phase locking)

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extreme narrative mode: embedding in a story

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math is inevitable,hard, fun, and sexy

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how to prove it?and whodunnit?only the parrot

knows…

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beautiful losermathematician

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Turing’s Net ghostteaches CS

to star-crossed lovers

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Εκδόσεις ΛιβάνηΙούλιος 2003

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Salgarism

Embedding story writing is a constant struggle with it…

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story-telling and programming:a comparison

• Stories too must compile and run

(“work”, get published, be read)

• Stories can have bugs

• And the construction problems they present are maddeningly combinatorial

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“I’m gonna tell you a story”( LOGICOMIX )

G. Cantor G. Frege B. Russell L. WittgensteinD. Hilbert

K. Gödel & friend E. PostA. M. Turing J. Von Neumanneniac

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Madness in their method?(a re-telling)

G. Cantor G. Frege B. Russell L. WittgensteinD. Hilbert

K. Gödel & friend E. PostA. M. Turing

20ITICSE, July 2,2003

play by Doxiadisillustrates

Gödel’s theorem

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thank you!