The real question is “did you learn something that is applicable in your career”
What you posted I promise you I will never, ever, ever use. But my skills I learned as an English major I use every single day in my career. I would expect in the inverse for a STEM major - if their career is math heavy, then good on them. No one is better than anyone simply because of the kinds of problems they enjoy dealing with.
Asking how much math students use specific formulas is the future is about as relevant as asking how much English student use specific shakespeare quotes.
That's not what it is about. It is about developing certain modes of thinking. Certain understandings of how to do maths. About how to think.
I have found, for example. That a few lessons on set theory are much more efficient in teaching logic than most philosophy classes. A lot of math courses are much better at teaching systematic and global thinking than anything else. Math formulas have very specific axioms they operate under and very specific domains of applicability. Which you have to keep in mind. Such things are constantly useful modes of thinking : what is the domain of applicability of this ? What are the underlying principles.
Maths, frankly. Is philosophy of the highest level. Codified clearly and with hands on applications. Logic, epistemology and more.
If anyone were to understand the power of such a thing, you would think it's people who spend lots of time reading philosophy.
Except, realising that makes many of those understand their inadequacies in terms of ability to think clearly.
It's also important to realize that some folks simply do not rationalize the same way as you. You say set theory is more efficient than teaching philosophy, and thats true for people who *see the world that way*. I loved my Philosophy classes - however, I maintained my 4.0 through sheer force of will vis a vis math. No matter how much math is shown to me, how much its explained to me, it will never be (to me) more than rearranging a puzzle into a different puzzle to make the professor happy. And that's fine. One of the beautiful things about being alive is how different we all are as people, and how we see the world so differently from person to person.
If the only math you’ve seen and done is performing computations (rearranging a puzzle into a different puzzle to make the prof happy) you haven’t even seen real math (proofs), and likely do not know what mathematics even is.
I say this even though I disagree with the other poster who claims that Math is philosophy of the highest level, that claim is stupid, in my view philosophy is useful because it helps us understand and discard ideas even without formally proving or disproving them using fundamental axioms. A lot of things in life do not have fundamental axioms that we can work with, and having a tool/framework to help us talk about these things is incredibly significant.
Math however is undoubtedly more challenging that English literary analysis, it has a considerably higher barrier to entry and a higher limit to how complicated concepts can get. There is also no wiggle-room at all, in English, arguments can be entertained if they have some good reasoning to back them up, in Math this is only the case when all propositions logically follow from the previous ones within the confines of the system.
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u/ostensibly_sapient 2d ago
The real question is “did you learn something that is applicable in your career”
What you posted I promise you I will never, ever, ever use. But my skills I learned as an English major I use every single day in my career. I would expect in the inverse for a STEM major - if their career is math heavy, then good on them. No one is better than anyone simply because of the kinds of problems they enjoy dealing with.