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Although many math courses are described as “applied math” it would be more accurate to say they teach “applicable math”. Students are rarely given the opportunity to behave like applied mathematicians in most courses. Let us fix this by re-imagining applied mathematics as a conversation with reality and analyzing how to carry out this conversation, starting with a common textbook example.
We will draw on the history of mathematics to see what aspects are left out of most treatments of applied math. We will add these back into our discourse and further recast the doing of applied math as a form of scientific inquiry. We will offer a more complex example of how this works out in practice and conclude with a few general observations.
