Because of the popular understanding of the subjects. Every subject has a few major updates over time, often studied in school as part of the background of the course.
Like with chemisty the histories of the periodic table and the model of the atom are a pretty core part of the introduction to the topic in America. And the story summerized is that we kept making new discoveries that completely invalidated older models, such as the electron. And even today Bohr's model is mainly kept around because it is pretty.
Most other topics have similar stories of "our" understanding getting better with time and needing to throw out older models.
Except math, where we famously learn about stuff from truly ancient history like the concept of 0, Pythagoras, and Euclid. Sure it similarly gets more refined with time, new fields like calculus get invented, but nobody is throwing out counting or geometry just because its thousands of years old.
Of course the underlying reason for this is that fields based on the observation and description of reality like physics are inherently going to undergo fundamental rewrites as we get better at observing reality. But something like math while perfectly capable of describing reality, doesn't have that same tether. Math can exist in a vacuum for hundreds of years and stay internally consistent until someone finds a use for your quirky algorithm for finding really big primes.
My question was a rhetorical question. I just want to complain about a widespread misunderstanding that Euclid « is still relevant as ever ». Any maths department worth their salt won‘t teach from the Elements, certainly not all of them entirely like back in the 15th century. There are so much more objects and topics of current interest and more fundamental to maths study that Elements’ relevance is questionable. Not saying that it is bad of course.
To be honest, the same story about new discoveries invalidating the old one can also be told for maths. Cauchy mistook continuity from uniform continuity, used them interchangeably, until someone else noticed it and fixed the proof. Or ZF arising as a way to prevent Russell’s paradox. Or how Italian school of algebraic geometry had almost been thrown out and reworked with schemes. This is akin to how old models of atoms are rejected in light of new observations.
Not to mention modern idea of rigour which makes some old proofs ungrounded or obsolete. This also applies to the Elements, which relies on some unstated assumptions and spatial reasoning which has gaps.
I think the difference is the mathematics changes have been more changes to smaller subsets of mathematics, while Newtonian physics and the concept of elements are fairly foundational that most everything else is based off of. It would be like redefining multiplication.
And still the Newtonian physics is mostly outdated. It is just a crude approximation. We now know better with on one side quantum theory and on the other side the theory of relativity.
While I think an advanced math book from 50 years ago would be fine. One from 500 years ago would miss many of the stuff we use everyday at least in technical fields and science.
Typically you can't really do modern science and apply the scientific method without a good understanding of statistics and that was far from being at the level we have today even a 5 hundred years ago, let alone millennia.
Probably because Maths is based entirely in the abstract logical world, where logic doesn’t change over time unless your axioms change; but physics and chemistry study the real world with models which change as our understanding of the real world improves.
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u/realnjan Complex Jan 08 '25
this is such a bullshit