Couple of things:
- Don’t forget whiteboards and sticky notes. I bought a huge whiteboard for my home office and it’s one of the best purchases I’ve ever made for any kind of intellectual productivity.
- I disagree quite strongly with this:
Math education teaches one how to prove theorems and perform calculations. In one sense, the only thing that matters in math is getting the right answer, just as in painting a picture all that matters is the impact the final result has on the viewer.
What matters in mathematics is not “the right answer”, because even the idea of “the right answer” is presumptuous — many things we work on have no single right answer (“the answer” is highly contingent on the way the problem is framed, the assumptions that are made, the data that are available, etc.) and we have done a huge disservice in focusing, laser-like, on “getting the right answer” as what really matters. Instead what really matters is the process: How you frame a problem, the assumptions we make in approaching it, the pros and cons of our choices, the methods we choose, the data we utilize, and how we frame and communicate our reasoning. I certainly hope that math education focuses on this and not answer-getting.
