Midjourney Brains

Midjourney medeley: I, II, III, IV, V
The following pictures were used to for This video about derivatives. How do you illustrate this? Well, of course one can show the graphs (which is done on the slides), but that is a bit cheap. So, I added the pictures of the brains (Of course with acknowledgment of AI). It still amazes me. You can get thousands of brains and they all would look different.

Some side remark about "memory": One of the most important things (I believe) in education is not to neglect the power of memory. Of course, this is a matter of balance. If you are a C programmer and have to look up how to import a library or make a loop, you are just too slow (and a programming idiot. Nobody would hire you). You might have to look up some stuff, but the basic nitty gritty things need to be known. A chemist needs to know a few molecules, a biologist a few proteins, a musician should know a few facts about the instrument, when studying a language, one has to know a few words. Only in mathematics, some educators have decided a few decades ago, that "memorization is stupid" (with devastating consequences for math education. We still sink to the bottom of the pit internationally because of that.) It is cool even for famous mathematicians for example to complain how terrible their education have been in the past in Europe, where they had to "memorize "stuff. The question is then of course for a critical thinker, why they have become famous and successful. In practically all aspects of life, in politics, in arts, in business, finance, all sciences, to "know stuff" is considered important. Only in math, we have the dogma that memorization is bad.

(By the way, my own memory had been better and this was through training. In high school, in English classes we had for example regularly to have memorized the reading. We had to cite verbatim (from memory) text we read for the day. I still remember having been asked to read from memory a paragraph from Joseph Conrad. I'm sure today demanding such things would be considered child abuse. I also had to learn poems by heart and recite them.)

So, I tried in this video using pictures of the brain to "hammer in" the message that knowing a few derivatives is important. The video also contains a few hints how one might remember these derivatives. "BeCOSe there is a minus SINe" allows to remember cos'=-sin.
Oliver Knill, Posted Bebruary 13, 2024,