I often teach a course with the enigmatic title “Fundamentals of Mathematics I”, intended for liberal arts majors. This is usually the last encounter with math for students in non-scientific disciplines. The syllabus contains a decent amount of optional topics so it is quite possible to tailor the material to one’s taste and professional interests. As many of us are well aware, a course like this poses its unique challenges. Unlike calculus, where the topics are fairly standard, a “fundamentals” course must, in my view, depend much more on mathematical ideas and much less on drudgery computations. Of course, students need to compute, but the result of their computational efforts should be exciting and fun, rather than a more or less meaningless answer that matches the solutions page at the end of the chapter.
These are the topics I usually teach: set theory, logic, group theory, and combinatorial methods. All lend themselves to a great deal of enjoyment, where students are confronted with deep ideas (e.g. what is truth? what is counting? does infinity come in different “sizes”?). Some students feel bewildered when they discover how difficult it can be to “count”.
It is a time-tested favorite of mine to teach them about groups. But unlike a formal course in abstract algebra, I tell them briefly what a group is, how abstract notions can be fun and useful, and after showing them the cyclic groups, both infinite and finite, I proceed fairly quickly to the dihedral groups D3 and D4 (of orders 6 and 8 respectively). I construct them as the groups of rigid symmetries (rotations and reflections) of the triangle and square. D3 is such a revelation since it is the smallest group that happens to be non-commutative; and I usually spend several lectures drawing pictures and discussing composition of symmetries. It is really exciting to reveal to them how “multiplication” is not a universal idea and it can be defined as a non-commutative binary operation. After producing the multiplication tables of both D3 and D4 we set out to explore the orders of individual elements as well as the subgroup structures of each one of these groups. We emphasize the subgroups of rotations and reflections.
One of my favorite results in elementary group theory is Lagrange’s theorem: If G is a group of order n and H is a subgroup of order m, them m divides n. I take advantage of the sheer simplicity of this result and “test” it for D3 and D4. It is not magic, I tell them, it’s a theorem!… I also exploit Lagrange’s result by bringing the (finite) cyclic groups back and sharing the pleasant fact that the converse of Lagrange is true in that context: if Cn is the finite cyclic group of order n and m is any divisor of n, there exists a subgroup (necessarily cyclic) of Cn whose order is m. And yes, we “test” the truth of this and explore the consequences when n is prime.
Many topics presented in more advanced courses in combinatorics, abstract algebra, logic, etc. can certainly be made accessible to a liberal arts audience. The trick, of course, is to explain the ideas in layman’s terms, progress to some level of formalization, and work out many enlightening examples. Teaching this course has been very satisfactory indeed. My hope is and has always been to leave my students with some long-lasting interest in the ideas behind mathematics, as well as a taste of what mathematicians do.