[Blindmath] intro

[Andrew Stacey]

Hi,

First up, I'm a sighted mathematician.  So I can't say anything about the hows
and how-nots of doing mathematics with partial sight or no sight.  However,
a couple of things in this exchange have made me want to chip in from my
perspective as a mathematician.

1. To get this out of the way, LaTeX is a typesetting system which is very
well suited to writing mathematics.  However, it is like a programming
language and so when you read it, you almost never read the actual source: you
read a compiled version.  From what I've read on this mailing list, it seems
that if what you need is not available in a suitable format then it can be
useful to get hold of the LaTeX source and read that.  However, I would hope
that there were suitable texts for you at the level that you describe so that
you don't need to worry about LaTeX yet.  To give some context, I didn't start
using LaTeX until my third year of undergraduate studies.

2. Let me say this very loudly.

      Mathematics is not taught in school.

What is taught in school is numeracy, not mathematics.  Occasionally there are
glimpses of what is real mathematics, but for the most part it's pure and
simple numeracy.  Mathematics is about spotting patterns and seeing
connections.  Mathematics is the science of ideas: we invent a game, lay out
the rules, and then simply play it to see what happens.  What, perhaps,
separates us out from other subjects is that when we play a game then we play
strictly by the rules: we never break them.  On the other hand, we do our best
to circumvent them.  (I should say that we also have no problem inventing and
adding new rules: if we see some behaviour that we don't like then we say "New
rule!  No huffing above the diagonal."  However, then we have a new game and
we don't pretend that the old game is the same as the new game.)

As well as what you are doing, I would recommend getting copies of the books
by Martin Gardner.  He used to write columns for Scientific American on
mathematical ideas.  All of the ones that I've read have been accessible to
almost anyone and all are about simply playing with ideas.  I find that an
excellent introduction to what mathematics really is, rather than what is
taught.

Lastly on this point, I didn't find mathematics particularly interesting until
my third year of undergraduate.  And I was doing a mathematics degree (that
is, 100% mathematics - I was in the UK where, unlike the US, you don't "major"
in a subject, you do just that subject).

Andrew