ezyang’s blog

the arc of software bends towards understanding

Is it better to teach formalism or intuition?

Note: this is not a discussion of Hilbert's formalism versus Brouwer's intuitionism; I'm using formalism and intuition in a more loose sense, where formalism represents symbols and formal systems which we use to rigorously define arguments (though not logic: a sliding scale of rigor is allowed here), while intuition represents a hand-wavy argument, the mental […]

  • March 18, 2012