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Rubrik: Mittwochs-Kolumnen |
Print-Version
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| The nature of decorative mathematics | |
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(Click here for the german version of this text.) Recently, a professor asked a student: "Erklär das doch etwas sketchy, damit auch der non-expert eine flavour von der area bekommt". Did you understand? You didn't? Indeed, the interesting thing is not what he meant, but how typical a sentence like this one is for the everyday academic. Let's have a look into our cliché-collection: engineers are usually entirely unintelligible. Already in highschool they suffered in the german classes. Now, at ETH, they are happy to deal with content instead of form. Given industry's continuous complaints about ETH graduates not being able to give a short presentation, there might be something true about this cliché... So, why don't we seem able to express ourselves? We do learn german in school after all. Are we not learning correctly? Or not enough? Or are we simply using our language inappropriately? Let's make a test: a brief comparison between german and american text books. During the entire period of my studies, american books were considered easier and clearer to understand. The german ones were ill-reputed as overly correct and as containing to many formulae. Experts called this kind of writing "decorative mathematics". However, that is not necessarily so. Translations of the english books were equally easy to understand. Apparently the "usual" use of language seems to be fundamentally different... So, what is the situation at ETH like? Students generally don't have to think about their utterances at all. Among the professors, there appear to be two fractions: on the one hand the ones who adhere to the "content-instead-of-form" philosophy, and on the other hand the ones, who try to find a proper "german" term for the very least technical term. Both fractions produce equally amusing utterances.
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The initially cited anglo-saxon universities value language more than we do here. For example, even technical questions are tested by writing a short essay. This even seems to improve upon the technical knowledge. A german teacher in my former highschool showed this once nicely: she had two classes write a physics test. For one of them the test counted as a german test as well. Interestingly, this class had the better physics scores... So, it seems to help to take care of one's language. Fortunately, we are at a technical university and hence need not offer the universality of a university. Thus, we are not obliged to adhere to high literary standards. That wouldn't even be necessary. Who wants to read papers in verse, anyway? We need a tool, the wise use of language, that allows us to express our ideas clearly and precisely. And what do we need to this end? The knowledge that we have to take care of our language? Slides without typos and gramatical errors (not to mention content)? Comprehensible diploma and semester theses? Exams in which orthographic errors count as well? Publications that are enjoyable to read? Admittance of language courses as D-GESS classes (as Goethe said, one has to learn a foreign language in order to find out something about one's own)? All of these? Or even more? Good ideas are our most important resource. And the ability to talk about them is our most important tool. That holds not only for teaching and the (increasingly important) communication with the world outside the ivory tower, but also and especially for our research work. |
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