Mastering an experimental approach to mathematics: Are the expert skills similar to the ones displayed by experts trained in a traditional way?

01 August 2013

I recently came one more time across a post on what is it like to understand advanced mathematics?. Although the number of people reaching the level of mastery described in this post are certain few, I wonder what would be the differences in the type of expertise and insight that would be developed when comparing traditional mathematicians vs. those trained primarily from an experimental perspective. I am actually not sure whether there are people who are solely trained as experimental mathematicians, but even a comparison with the ones primarily focusing on experimental mathematics would be fairly interesting.

Reason for my interest in this topic is that I identify this as the geek/Agile/constructivist/Merrienboer way of doing mathematics, something that Jonathan Borwein has been advocating for a while through several books, including his latest An Introduction to Modern Mathematical Computing: With Mathematica. Perhaps making the book focused on, say, Sage would make it more widely accessible, but regardless this is a very exciting field for mathematical education.

by Ricardo Pietrobon

About Me

My name is Ricardo Pietrobon and I am interested in big data and situated cognition applied to immersive distance education.

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