A more recent example I've come across are n-dimensional spaces. I realized that most people have problems to make sense of the concept behind that because they've been stuck in thinking mathematically.
I think of points in an n-dimensional space as objects holding n different types of information, which is a practical approach, and has lit a candle for some other people I explained it to this way as well.
For example, images are often stored as 4 dimensional structures, with the dimensions representing height, width, depth and color value. Every point in that structure is a pixel of the image. You can easily expand this to any number of dimensions, and it still makes sense - you're just adding information (eg, add a fifth dimension for time, and you've got yourself a sequence of images - a simple video).
My beef with the way math is often approached is that on the one hand, it's asserted that math is the universal solution to all problems - including practical ones - but on the other hand, more often than not math is removed so far from reality that it's nearly impossible to make any practical use of it.
I think of points in an n-dimensional space as objects holding n different types of information, which is a practical approach, and has lit a candle for some other people I explained it to this way as well.
For example, images are often stored as 4 dimensional structures, with the dimensions representing height, width, depth and color value. Every point in that structure is a pixel of the image. You can easily expand this to any number of dimensions, and it still makes sense - you're just adding information (eg, add a fifth dimension for time, and you've got yourself a sequence of images - a simple video).
My beef with the way math is often approached is that on the one hand, it's asserted that math is the universal solution to all problems - including practical ones - but on the other hand, more often than not math is removed so far from reality that it's nearly impossible to make any practical use of it.