Context

The link provided below is a great example of a mathematical technique being introduced in a very simple and effective manner

Link :An Introduction to Lagrange Multipliers

The point of the article is to make ANY person curious on some of the aspects of the Lagrangian  Multipliers

How many times have we come across teachers/instructors just dumping a set of formulae/definitions with out taking the time to explain the CONTEXT…Most of the times you read stuff with out a proper context and sadly when the context appears, you are clueless because you don’t even know that you have a specific math tool to solve the problem.

I was discussing with a friend of mine about markov processes today and one of the points of our discussion was - WHAT IF markov process in any grad course was introduced with google as an example .Google’s page rank algo has a significant amount of math involving markov processes. How many of the grad students who study markov processes know about it ? Would it not be interesting to straight away cite that fact in the class and create a context ? WHY NOT make the first assignment in the course to actually identify the need for markov process in an algorithm such as page rank? Will it not make any grad student curious about markov process. It would immediately bring the context to what one is learning.

I guess a lot of times in our education system, we are overwhelmed because of the breadth of the material being covered, which is in a way not bad because it gives a flavor of the various possibilities that one can further work on. But if the breadth is not combined with some indication of the CONTEXT, then the whole purpose of education is lost !!