This project has been a long, complex endeavor, which at times was tedious, and other times enlightening. When I started, I had a good idea of what I wanted to read and what I wanted to do. The book I chose, (I know "book" isn't very specific, but I'm not sure what else to call it) The Drunkard's Walk by Leonard Mlodinow was one I had been intending on reading for long time, but never got around to. So I took this chance to read it, and I have learned a lot from it, not just the math behind many of the methods outlined in the book, but also the impact those methods have, and the opinions society has of applied math. The book itself is not very clear on a purpose, as Mlodinow just rambles about math while intertwining little stories here and there, but it was obvious that one of his frustration had to do with the way math is treated, taught, and applied. And so that became the topic of my multigenre research project.
When I sat down to do my first blog post, I had no idea how I would be able to come up with four different genres to write for this project. There was no way I could write a poem about math, or a story that teaches math. And so my project evolved into something more having to do with the applications of math, of how we, as a society, treat math, and what are some flaws in our ideas. I also got a great idea from Cammy, which I'm pretty happy about. The more I read, and the more research I did, the more I realized that there was a real problem with the way we teach applied math/statistics/data analysis. I never thought that there would be so much out there about how statistics are misused in everyday life, because, well, those facts would probably be statistics as well, which would seem a little hypocritical. But there was real material out there, and a lot of it I wasn't able to incorporate into the expository essay, because I heard from the grapevine that it shouldn't be too long. (My first draft was 7+ pages long in Word.) From this material, I got more ideas as to what I could do for the four pieces, and they were less about the math, and more about the philosophy behind the math and stuff.
My golden thread, was the quote "They don't understand. They don't understand the principles of randomness." I picked this because the book was about randomness, and I wrote about probability and how people don't really understand much of the math behind every life. I couldn't come up with a good symbol that I could actually intertwine into the four pieces. I intended for the reader to end every piece thinking about whether or not they truly understand many of the decisions they make every day, or many of the things they hear. So I placed my golden thread at the end of every piece to emphasize it and hopefully give it a little more force.
I intended for my project to be eye-opening for people who don't understand math like I do, who have never given things like the math behind the success rate of medical tests a second thought. But it was hard for me to actually create something that would make sense to someone without extensive training in math and statistics, since I am very biased, and all of it makes sense to me. I certainly hope that I achieved this goal to some extent, thought I think maybe there should be more walkthrough of the math than I had actually included, or at least a little more elaboration. I am pretty satisfied with the result of the project, and I hope you are too. I appreciate you taking the time to read this letter and the project.
Sincerely,
Justin Liao
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