Le mathématicien adulte et l'enfant physicien?
To demonstrate the cardinal difference between the ways problems are posed and solved by physicists and by mathematicians, Arnold provides the following problem for children: “On a bookshelf there are two volumes of Pushkin’s poetry. The thickness of the pages of each volume is 2 cm and that of each cover 2 mm. A worm holes through from the first page of the first volume to the last page of the second, along the normal direction to the pages. What distance did it cover?” Usually kids have no problems to find the unexpected correct answer, 4 mm, in contrast to adults. For example, the editors of the highly respectable physics journal initially corrected the text of the problem itself into: “from the last page of first volume to the first page of the second” to “match” the answer given by Arnold [1, 17]. The secret of kids lies in the experimental method used by them: they simple go to the shelf and see how the first page of the first volume and the last page of the second are situated with respect to each other...
(Submitted on 16 Mar 2010)
Le lecteur est évidemment invité à découvrir dans l'article en question ce que cette parabolle peut illustrer. Dans la même veine ...
