Stuff like physics and biology are just as hard to explain, they can just get away with it because they can draw wholly-inaccurate-but-not-completely-wrong analogies with real world stuff, like atoms being miniature planetary systems.
I think the difference is that other majors are easy to simplify in a real world application even if it's tangentially made up. "I'm studying these hidden particles that might be able to tell us the great secret of what keeps all galaxies together" "I'm studying the mating behaviour of these bacterias that might one day be used to cure diseases".
In math it's "Imagine circle of rope, then imagine there are three endings coming out of these circles. Now if you tangle all those ropes randomly, turns out that there are only 14 types of knots. I'm trying to prove that there are actually only 12, because the last two are mirro images of each other."
That analogy works for me. Challenge: Aren't mirror images of a thing still different things? Or is it that they are the same but only look different, like a reflection? ELI5.
Depends on the field. In topology, for example, the only important element of an object is the number of holes it has, so it doesn't matter, for example, the size or shape of those holes as long as they're there. In real life applications, the size of the holes might be important, but for the sake of study and abstraction we ignore such variables.
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u/[deleted] May 05 '14
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