Maybe it’s just me, but I feel related and connected mean basically the same thing, whereas interrelated and interconnected imply a mutual dependence between two or more items.
[quote author=Brazilian_dude link=board=idiom;num=1126676030;start=0#1 date=09/14/05 at 17:07:43]Maybe it’s just me, but I feel related and connected mean basically the same thing, whereas interrelated and interconnected imply a mutual dependence between two or more items.
BD, this is my feeling also.
With "related" and "connected", there is a simple linear connection between two objects. A is related to B. (and therefore, B is related to A).
With "interrelated", it’s more like "A is related to B and C" (and therefore, B is related to C and A, and C is related to A and B). The addition of extra relationships is what differentiates between "related" and "interrelated".
Although there is a certain interchangeability between "related" and "interrelated", one would tend to use the latter to define more complex relationships, and the former to define simple relationships.
Azh
(who didn’t understand pronumerals until she learned about variables in programming)
Interesting, I don’t recall hearing the word pronumeral in school. But I’ve always been a computer geek, so the word variable was never much of a stranger.
Well, just by glancing at the hit list Google generated, I gathered it is the same thing as a variable... but I wonder why its use seems to be concentrated in Australia?
A pronumeral is a type of variable, one that represents a number. In programming, variables often represent other things besides numerical values. Or maybe I’m just making that up ;) Mostly they mean the same thing.
In its most basic form, a pronumeral is a letter that stands in place of a number in an equation.
For example: 3x + 4x = 7x
and other more complicated thinggies that I never understood fully. Maths and I never got along very well. Quadratic equations may as well have been taught in ancient Greek for all I could understand of them.
It also used to crop up in forms like:
3x + 4x = 21
At which point you were supposed to figure out the value of x.
As I said, I never understood the concept of a letter standing for a number until I was in my 20s and learning computer programming.
Oh, and Tim, you’re quite right. All the top hits on Google for pronumeral were Australian. I wonder what it’s called elsewhere in the world.
[quote author=Flaminius link=board=idiom;num=1126676030;start=0#9 date=09/16/05 at 06:04:01]Symbols.
Now you see, if you mentioned mathematical symbols to me, just before my eyes glazed over and my brain went to its happy place, I’d think of triangles and boxes and squiggly things.
ack. dang, my brain’s gone to its happy place again.
[quote author=Katy link=board=idiom;num=1126676030;start=0#11 date=09/17/05 at 13:49:43]Azzy, you crack me up.
why, thankyou.
I cried all the way through 10th grade Algebra So I completely understand. My teacher was a good one so she helped me, but Geometry, the(mean man) teacher’s idea of help was to make you stand at the board (in front of the whole class) while he ridicules you into "understanding" yes that did go on in the 60’s.
I’m not sure if I mentioned before, but when I was in highschool, the theory was that if you were smart enough to continue with a language past the compulsory first two years, you were smart enough to do "advanced" math and science. There was no option - if you did language, you did the advanced math.
now, my brain copes reasonably well with languages. I *averaged* A+ in English. But give me a page of maths and my brain can’t cope.
Full kudos to my poor math teacher, who spent two years of hell with me at least ensuring I hit a passing grade. His most common refrain when checking my work was "You cannot get that answer from this working out!" and I would ask if the answer was correct, and he’d (mostly) say "yes". So I’d ask if the working-out made a difference in that case. I think the poor man went grey from teaching me I’m not sure which one of us was more relieved when I hit fifth form and was permitted to give up both maths and science.
Many years later I bumped into my maths teacher in a shopping centre, and stopped to speak with him. He asked what I had done since leaving school, and I told him I was a computer programmer (at the time I was heavily involved in producing software for pre-literate children). The poor man just shook his head.
Azh
(2 + 2 = 5 ... for large values of 2, or small values of 5)
I don’t see why you wouldn’t be good with both words and maths. The greatest mathematical statement of all time would have to be Euler’s equation:
e to the power of i.pi + 1 = 0
I nominate this as the greatest mathematical statement of all time (if not the greatest statement of any type of all time) because:
* It’s elegant
* It’s not intuitively obvious - far from it
* It’s almost astonishingly simple to prove
* It’s succinct
* It contains the basis of all basic numerals (0 and 1), the basis of all mathematical operations (addition, multiplication and exponentials), the basis of all irrationals (pi and e) and the basis of all imaginary numbers (i) and nothing else. In other words, absolutely everything in pure and applied maths can be derived from this one little statement.
* It equals nothing!
The reason I laud Euler’s equation in a site dedicated to language and word-lovers is that it is a model for literature. All good literature is elegant and succinct. Good literature never tells you something you already knew but is always instantly recognisable as obvious once you read it. It juxtaposes the basic fundamentals of life, the transcendental and the soaring of the imagination, before concluding by equating them to nothing - or does it? That seeming infinitesimality turns out to be the fulcrum, the pivot, or even, as Renee Decartes called it, "the origin". To conclude at the origin, the (0,0,0) point from which everything is measured, and which gives everything its meaning - isn’t that the whole point of literature?
So let’s have none of this codswallop about maths and language being unrelated, or about being good at one and not the other.
[quote author=hushai link=board=idiom;num=1126676030;start=0#13 date=09/18/05 at 01:00:40]
So let’s have none of this codswallop about maths and language being unrelated, or about being good at one and not the other.
I never said that they were unrelated.
What I said was that while I am pretty good with language, I’m not good with maths.
Like some people have problems with reading, I have similar problems with mathematics - it’s called dyscalculia. Although I manage enough math to get through my day; I can add, subtract, multiply etc, given a pen and paper, or a calculator, but I cannot fathom my way through more advanced mathematics. Many people have tried to help me, and for all I understand of what they are saying, they might as well have been speaking to me in Swahili.
Blanket generalisations like "if you’re good with language, you’ll be good with maths" are not universally true. One of my children is very good with maths, two are average, and one is like me.
A good educational system would recognise that. Unfortunately, in Australia in the 1970s there was no recognition, and like Katy I suffered humiliation and embarrassment for something which is not my fault, and which was not under my control. Had I been able to take maths at a slower pace or a lower level, I might have done better. But forcing the correlation between learning a language and learning advanced maths seems to me rather like saying "If you’re good at tapdancing, you’ll be able to play the clarinet". It aint always so, Joe.
Good literature never tells you something you already knew but is always instantly recognisable as obvious once you read it.
Excluding poetry, (ok, when it tells you something you already know it isn’t poetry) but sometimes needs many readings. And e^i*pi+1=0 is very concise poetry. It’s a statement that many people take for granted without actually thinking about what it means. And I’m one of them. I get the rotation and all that, but it just isn’t intuitive to me. It’s up there with the Mandelbrot set in terms of ‘hey, what the…’
And on-topic too, serious ‘interrelatedness’ of seemingly unrelated terms.
Euler ... I wonder what it felt like when he came up with that one.
Is it british or australian to say "maths" where americans would use simply "math"? Like, my math teacher=my maths teacher? Interesting… I’m pretty good at math and language… But, it’s more like i’m good at math and like language, so, work with less frustration towards it. Music=no good.
Yeah, my opinion.
J
(played clarinet for 3 yrs. didn’t come about to much… stupid fingers)
I’m not sure which one of us was more relieved when I hit fifth form and was permitted to give up both maths and science.
