ISSUE4 【CSMY作文互改小组】第六次作业

stevenhuUID: 172722

ISSUE4
No field of study can advance significantly unless outsiders bring their knowledge to that field.

DATE 2007-01-21

I agree with the speaker's conclusion that no area of research can acquire important achievement unless under the help of other areas, since it is a real scenario in real life. To demonstrate this conclusion, I will mainly discuss the use of other discipline's expertise in mathematics, social science and the art of painting respectively.

Let us firstly consider mathematic experts bring experts from other science and technology to significantly improve the efficiency of solving certain type of problems. In mathematics, there is a special group of combination optimization problems called NP-hard problem, which means scientists can not find an algorithm with acceptable complexity to solve it. However, these mathematical experts were inspired by the process of annealing in producing steel, which firstly heat and then cool the steel in a controlled manner, in order to assure the max performance of steel. By using the similar technique, those scientists invented a kind of efficient algorithm which is called simulated annealing, and significantly lowered the computation burden to an acceptable degree with the compromise of losing just a little accuracy. After that, these mathematicians also designed an efficient algorithm named Genetic Algorithm, which by its name means algorithm to simulate the phenomenon of natural selection and mutation, and again this algorithm greatly lowered the computation burden while achieving excellent accuracy. After all, both of the two algorithms are designed and implemented in computers, which is a production of modern electronic technology.

This situation is also true in social science. For example, the NP-hard problem mentioned in the previous passage widely exists in management science, say how to perform the contracted producing tasks in the fastest way, or how to package several products of different shape together and so on. The solution to these problems usually directly determines the producing efficiency of a factory, thus affects the profit of that firm. Therefore, using the algorithms provided by the expertise of mathematicians can usually improve their efficiency amazingly, thus significantly promote the development of management. Another subdivision of social science which greatly benefited from expertise of other discipline would be history. By the knowledge of biochemists, historians can infer the age of a certain historical site. By the experience of artists, historians can generally determine the social relationship of an ancient civilization from paintings. And even astronomers can help historians to explain the layout of an ancient city, since ancient people usually use star phase as an indication of buildings and structures.

This principle even exists in the art of painting. Let us have a close view of an western painting in the 16th to 18th century. In those years painters begin to know some knowledge of color and light, and use the area, contrast and occlusion relationship to express the distance. Furthermore, a survey among those paintings would review that almost all the architectures appeared in the painting strictly obeys the perspective geometry, a projection relationship discovered by again mathematics indicating a transformation between the real 3D objects and its 2D image formed by eyes. Through the use of these achievements from physics and geometry, these painters vividly recorded the scene of contemporary life and working, which is a significant progress compared with their predecessors..

From the discussion above, expertise from other disciplines has widely used in mathematics, management and painting, and really bolstered the development of these fields of study. Fundamentally, since all areas of study are internally linked together, the speaker's conclusion that expertise of other fields can significantly promote a field's development is convincing.