There’s a college in Chicago, i think it’s IIT maybe, that used aerial photography to map out the student cow paths, then they redid all the sidewalks to incorporate those paths.
Edit: they ended up adding a building in a grassy area and maintained all the hall/walkways of the building in line with the sidewalks/cowpaths. Kinda neat.
This has happened at a LOT of colleges. Penn State’s quad is crisscrossed with paths that they paved.
Ohio State University
I wish I was taught about the usefulness of maths growing up. When I did A-level with differentition and integration I quickly forgot as I didn’t see a point in it.
At about 35 someone mentioned diff and int are useful for loan repayment calculations, savings and mortgages.
Blew my fucking mind cos those are useful!
Hated Algebra in high school. Then years later got into programming. It’s all algebra. Variables, variables everywhere.
Ehh I wouldn’t say variables in programming are all that similar to variables in algebra. In a programming language, variables typically are just a name for some data. Whereas in algebra, they are placeholders for unknown values.
That’s one of the big problems with maths teaching in the UK, it’s almost actively hostile to giving any sort of context.
When a subject is reduced to a chore done for its own sake it’s no wonder most students don’t develop a passion or interest in it.
In the US it’s common to give students “word problems” that describe a scenario and ask them to answer a question that requires applying whatever math they’re studying at the time. Students hate them and criticize the problems for being unrealistic, but I think they really just hate word problems because because they find them difficult. To me that means they need more word problems so they can actually get used to thinking about how math relates to the real world.
all the student needs to know is
c<a+b, not the actual formula or theory behind itThis is actually a case of the Cauchy-Scwartz inequality: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchy–Schwarz_inequality
c<=a+b🤓
Student: “Hey, a shortcut! Let me first just walk around the long way so I can measure the length of the other two sides, multiply those lengths by themselves, add them together, and find out how much extra walking I’ve saved myself by taking the shortcut. Boy, this shortcut sure is saving me a lot of effort. Hooray Pythagoras!”
Just because you do something so crazy fast in your head it seems obvious, doesn’t mean you didn’t do the thing you did with the thing.
The hypotnuse is shorter than the other two sides combined. That is the usage here though
“the shortest distance between two points is a straight line” is what is being used here. It forming a triangle is incidental.
Triangle Inequality also!
That footpath looks like a brachistochrone curve. Interesting.
Now, I’m wondering if we have a thriving Desire Paths (that’s what these paths are called) community somewhere on here.
One of my favourite names for anything is these being called ‘desire lines’. It’s so whimsical.
Indeed! “Desire paths” is the name I heard. There’s a community, too: !desire_paths@sh.itjust.works
Unfortunately theres no posts for 4 months.
Time to go get myself so photos
If you’re not opposed to stealing from Reddit, desire paths was one of my favorite subs before the shitification
Idk, this really doesn’t have to do anything with Pythagora’s Theorem
The way is sqr(2)=1.4 instead of 2.
