Some may wonder to what extent all this focus on and interest in UAPs (UFOs a subset) is impacting our spreading Martian Math curriculum, within our Silicon Forest context.
The focus on legit Mars explorations, anchored from Earth, were already a deliberate tie-in, i.e. during class at Reed College campus, we would watch YouTubes of the Mars landers, taking into account their findings. The science-to-fiction ratio was meant to be bully for science i.e. > 1.
But then remember, around a scientific core, we weave science fiction, consciously simulating, or simply exercising our powers of imagination for both didactic and recreational purposes. We play fantasy-based games sure, but look how hard those make us think, as game developers.
We stay buff with matrix algebra and everything, even quaternions in some game engines. We’re flirting with universal algebra (UA, Grassmann) even as we project those Pokémon.
The relationship is precessional. Journalists are not generally interested in the Math Wars per se, and only a tiny clique of debaters keep those alive.
Adopting Drug War nomenclature, we have the various math curriculum pushers and enablers, who stand to benefit from large armies of addicts. Calculus’s Invisible Army is an especially big one, participating in the four year college racket.
As Andrew Hacker describes in his controversial book The Math Myth: And Other STEM Delusions, high school and college calculus play a serious gatekeeping role when it comes to entering some professions.
I’ve been a trooper and later officer in the Calculus Invisible Army myself, slightly on the fringe maybe, but that’s not necessarily a disadvantage in a market that tolerates, even encourages, some diversity.
Martian Math is fringe in its emphasis on computer programming (versus only calculators), object oriented in particular (setting up functional as a sister paradigm), tying types and objects to instances of polyhedra.
We might have the coordinates for the Archimedeans all pre-stored in some exercises, with the student’s job being to write the SQL to extract them, one at a time, from a relational database. We’ve had all this in place for a couple decades by now, while continuing to field test, reflect, and improve. Once a polyhedron is extracted, many parameters remain (play with em or accept the defaults) before composing a scene and rendering it e.g. in Blender or POV-Ray.
So it’s pretty likely that a journalist searching for “Martian” or “flying saucer” is eventually going to stumble upon one of our storyboards, involving hidden government facilities in contact with ETs. We use frameworks like that to couch our teachings about AC and DC electricity i.e. the Earthlings and Martians are collaborating on hydropower dams, using slightly different maths (reconciled within the curriculum).
So do I get a lot of inquiries from journalists asking if I’m a source regarding the UFOs people are talking about in WDC? Not really. It’s pretty obvious from the context that I’m more the high school level math teacher, networking with academics and administrators at various levels to usher in a more fluid form of mathematics teaching, more literary in many dimensions.
We may use a lot of the same tropes in our storytelling, but unless you hear them say “tetrahedron” rather more frequently than average, they’re likely from a different subculture. Look for other signs. Our Silicon Forest stuff has many differentiating characteristics. Private schools have more freedom to prototype.
But the assumption should not be that journalists are confused, or need to ask me much of anything. They bump into Martian Math online, and realize it’s something tangential, and then go on to pursue their UAPs down a different rabbit hole.
The net effect is increasing awareness of Martian Math, even if there’s a ships passing in the night aspect to the encounter. Maybe a more junior journalist, looking for something to write about, will return to the Math Wars scene and seek to pry out a cogent story. Start with Sputnik?
