he's not talking about completely about getting rid of them, only for high school. It's impossible to do math without fractions, as simple as that. He just proposes to introduce those along with integrals and such.

but us school system is fucked up as is, this might make things even worse

And those who argue about repeating numbers, they will never be as accurate as fractions. Computers approximate but real math is about precision. Infinite 0.333... is not as precise as 1/3rd. It approaches the number but never hits it.

You can use those subtraction tricks in the same way as you'd use a Turing machine to write computer programs... the question is - why? Fractions are much easier to work with than decimals

those lazy americans, no wonder the schools are a joke

That's a simple calculus problem. The derivative of (r^3)/3 is just r^2.

I didn't have much difficulty in math until I studied noneuclidean geometry. Got a C but was going through divorce at time so difficult to tell if it was me or the situation.

Of course anyone would use a fraction in that PARTICULAR situation

But you have problems where you will get output in decimal form that cannot be represented as fractions. For example, my senior project used a symplectic integration scheme to predict the positions of the plants over hundreds of millions of years. You couldn't represent those positions in fractions.

I hate math..

You'd probably write a program to do that, so who cares ;)

I did a whole bunch of stuff in matlab that spewed tables of decimals, there's time and place for everything

Wrong Colin. The answer is RDRR.. or r d rr.. or Har Dee Har Har.

"I think you'll be pleasantly surprised."

C'mon man... don't you watch the Simpsons?

"Penn State mathematician Andrews says he believes DeTurck's ideas will "unfortunately" gain traction because of the misguided belief that math education can somehow be made easy:

"Math is hard. The idea that somehow we're going to make math just fun is just a dream.""

My fucking god. This Andrews idiot should get his ass fired and never be allowed to teach again. Stick to the lab if you can't teach. Professors like this piss me right the fuck off. Math is only hard if you make it so.

I knew that "I think you'll be pleasantly surprised" sounded familiar.

true that

In FORTRAN no less. I have the world's most irrelevant programming skills. I learned FORTRAN and perl.

Hey don't feel left out, there's a certain someone on the board who swears by Perl, even for multithreaded system programming of all things! His ninja-mastery of the language almost made me learn Perl on several occasions... but I refuse to give in. :1orglaugh

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

As Chris Rock would say...
"I know math to, 1, 2, 4, 5, I'm coutin' these rocks BIATCH!!"

This is the best post in this thread. :1orglaugh

Pi is represented in decimals.

not a rocket scientist here but haven't we built space shuttles and shit with formulas using Pi?


just an observation.

the decimal is only an approximation of the real Pi, which is a fraction

i was taught Pi is a ratio. but i learnt in a puclic skool in amerika

ratio is a fraction... :/

ok, so what's Pi in a fraction then?

pi can't be written as a fraction. It is IRRATIONAL.

thank you for seconding my point.:)

I need sleep ;)

And what was in the coffee that the scientists drank?
point five and point five???? NO!!!!
http://www.pickyourown.org/icecream/halfandhalf.jpg

Here's a question.. why is something containing two components referred to as 1/2 and 1/2? Ever go to Panda Express? They offer chow mien or rice. So if you go up and say I'll have "half and half" they'll give you half chow mien and half rice... but if you walk up and just say "half", they'll look at you confused. They'll put in half chow mien and ask, and I quote, "and the other half?" ... ???? "RICE YOU FUCKING MORON!!!!!" I don't want half chow mien, and half chow mien.