Posted on 05/01/2016 11:46:48 AM PDT by JimSEA
Mathematician Edward Frenkel was promoting his New York Times bestseller “Love and Math.”
Social scientist Andrew Hacker, on the other hand, caught my attention immediately after the New York Times published his article arguing for the elimination of algebra from our education system. We don’t need it anymore, he claimed,. It does us far more bad than good.
Hacker is a hit now. His anti-math book, “The Math Myth: And Other STEM Delusions” is holding its own against “Love and Math,” despite Frenkel’s book being translated into more than a dozen languages and Frenkel’s indefatigable popularization of the power, passion, and beauty of math.
Is Hacker a doublethinking Orwellian demonizer, or does have a point?
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One of the biggest problems for math is that very few us get shown the big picture by master mentors when we’re young the way Edward Frenkel was. Demonstrating an innate talent and passion for mathematics early on, Frenkel recounts in his book how world-class mathematician Israel Gelfand took him in. Every Monday night for nearly 50 years on the 14th floor of the Moscow university building Gelfand “would welcome all undergraduates, talented graduate students and brilliant professors… These meetings, which often lasted well into the night, were more like a social event than a traditional seminar, where a speaker would go to a blackboard and talk for an hour. He [Gelfand] would walk the aisles, stop and chat with people, interrupt and ask questions, pull a member of the audience to the blackboard and ask them to repeat what had just been said or to find a mistake in it. His interest was always in the development of the next generation of mathematicians." Not surprisingly, many of Gelfand’s former students and seminar participants are now prominent mathematicians.
(Excerpt) Read more at science20.com ...
E=mc²
That’s why.
Reminds me of how the little mermaid forgot her algebra...
Question, do you think computers and information processing are important? Well, computer programming (at least as it stands today) is nothing but Algebra writ large. It is all variables and equations...
There are some people who are incapable of advanced mathematics, regardless of how much they “don’t apply themselves”. Search dyscalculia sometime.
Why teach math when H1b’s are so easy to hire?
This is time better spent promoting self-esteem.
Let’s not stop there!
So long as we are dumbing down why teach Physics, Geometry, Biology, The Calculus?
Who needs grades 6 through 12?
Kids need Business Math far more than Algebra. If you can’t balance a check book, run tables, set budgets, you will have far more problems than if you can’t handle a Quadratic equation.
Math is a dangerous black art that is used by global warming deniers to discredit those like Al Gore who have been given divine inspiration. To save the planet all math books should be incinerated and the CO2 from the incinerators should be pumped deep into chambers in the earth’s crust where it cannot harm those of us who live in harmony with nature.
Oops forget the /sarc tag. Sorry.
Another reason to homeschool. smh
Next, they’ll stop teaching how to use the slide rule or the meaning of significant digits.
“”””pie r squared?”””
No, pie are round.
how many is a sicilian?
yeh and cobbler r squared!
No. Pie are rectangular.
Notice at the end I used a upside down imaginary number to finish my cobbler.
On the plus side, it'd kill the Morlocks.
She is quite lovely.
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