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At 28, Peter Scholze is uncovering deep connections between number theory and geometry. In 2010, a startling rumor filtered through the number theory community and reached Jared Weinstein. Apparently, some graduate student at the University of Bonn in Germany had written a paper that redid “Harris-Taylor” — a 288-page book dedicated to a single impenetrable proof in number theory — in only 37 pages. The 22-year-old student, Peter Scholze, had found a way to sidestep one of the most complicated parts of the proof, which deals with a sweeping connection between number theory and geometry. “It was just so stunning...

Prof. Susan Engel, a psychologist, author and educator, published a controversial article in Bloomberg. The headline was "Want kids to learn math? STOP teaching it." http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-04-06/want-kids-to-learn-math-stop-teaching-it My local paper picked it up and I had a very violent reaction: that is the stupidest thing I have ever seen in a newspaper and, as you know, that covers a lot of ground. Later, when I went to Bloomberg to check on the comments, I was pleased to see many other people reacted as I did. Independent George wrote: 'This is quite possibly the worst educational advice I've ever read. I don't...

Modern Educayshun, a short film by Neel Kolhatkar, is a hilarious take on social justice and Oppression Olympics culture, and we urge you to watch it. It’s the followup to his short film #Equality, which enjoyed over a million views and has been making the rounds all year on social media since it was released in January. Neel Kolhatkar is an emerging talent in Australia. We like him!

A new trend in math at elementary schools around the country has parents pulling out their hair. Mainly because it is the opposite of how most of today's adults were taught to do simple multiplication in the first place. According to a Common Core math worksheet that's gone viral, an elementary child today cannot just say, "5 x 3 = 15." Instead they have to change the multiplication problem to addition before solving the equation. However, if the child says, "5 + 5 + 5 = 15," they will still lose points because the problem must be written as it...

The Education Establishment went way too far, and this has presented the country with a unique opportunity for real improvement of the public schools. As never before, parents across the United States will tell you emphatically that they hate Common Core, and they especially hate Common Core Math. The Education Establishment will try to maneuver around this revulsion. Compromises will be offered. The same dumb ideas will be repackaged as something new and wonderful. The challenge is to refuse to compromise. Sometimes a good thing, compromise is now the biggest threat to genuine reform. Our Education Establishment has been selling...

The following as been excerpted from Twilight of Abundance: Why Life in the 21st Century will be Nasty, Brutish, and Short by David Archibald:The United States is needlessly penalizing itself and squandering its resource endowment, all because of the big lie that carbon dioxide is causing dangerous global warming. The Chinese, in contrast, merely pay lip service to that big lie. The only reason they are making a token effort on the “global warming” front is to encourage Western countries to continue hobbling their own economies. One can be forgiven for thinking that there must be some truth in the...

Back in 2008, I wrote one of my first pieces for PJM: “Today’s Health Insurance Ain’t Insurance.” [1] I just re-read it and it stands up pretty well: today’s health insurance still ain’t. Have a look at it, as it has some more detailed explanations for the points I’m going to make in this article, but the point is this: there’s basic mathematics behind all real insurance, and while actuarial math can get pretty hairy, we don’t need it to see the underlying and essential flaw of the whole approach taken by the Affordable Care Act.At the heart of...

A fifth of adults are so bad at math that they struggle to perform basic mental arithmetic, a survey has revealed. More than a third can only manage sums that total less than 100 and have to use a calculator for anything larger. One in 50 people were stumped by adding or subtracting in their head if the total was more than ten. And one in three parents believed their children’s ability exceeded their own. …

To me seemingly lost among this hand wringing today is that Romney lost to Obama by less than 300,000 votes of out almost 117,000,000 votes casts. The electoral college can fool one into thinking a close election is a blowout. This was a close election. As of when I started to write this, had Mitt Romney won 46,040 more votes in Florida and 33,770 more votes in New Hampshire, 100,764 more votes in Ohio and 106,726 more votes in Virginia or 287,301 out of more than 17,500,000 cast in those 4 states. http://www.google.com/elections/ed/us/results People here and on the radio need...

Whether you accept this "deflated" rate (due to low labor force participation) or not there is no getting around this administrations abject failure on the economy.

Warning, this article contains superlatives and extreme statements. How should we teach the young? I believe everyone should be passionate about the answers. The country’s fate depends on it. Over the years I often heard the name John Saxon but knew for sure only that his books were popular among homeschoolers. I was under the impression that he wrote his books for them. Not true. He wrote his books for every kid stuck in a classroom. I’ve just finished “John Saxon’s Story: a genius of common sense in math education,” an excellent biography by Nakonia Hayes. It is a smart,...

Here’s some good news. M. J. McDermott’s wonderful video about why Americans don’t know math has exceeded 1,000,000 views. This is one of the best videos about education on the web. If you haven’t viewed it, please do. Running time is about 15 minutes. In this video, McDermott explains the flaws in so-called Reform Math, which was introduced to the country around 1985. Reform Math actually consists of more than a dozen separate but basically identical curricula. As fast as a community figures out that one of these things is bad, the so-called experts introduce another. These experts are diabolically...

For a few years I thought the worst possible gimmick in education was Whole Word, basically a device to make sure kids don't learn to read. In the last few months, the clamor grew about Core Standards and National Standards, and I started to focus on arithmetic. More and more I’m struck by the parallel with Whole Word. The Education Establishment seems to specialize in coming up with techniques that are almost guaranteed not to work. I know there are cynics who will say, well, of course, everyone knows this. Even so, the thing that fascinates me is the amount...

What follows is just a short review of a book nobody would think of reading, a paperback published in 1964 to help parents understand New Math. But if you've been wondering how our Education Establishment has managed to sabotage math skills in this country, this review will be helpful:---------------- "New Math was one of the silliest, most pretentious, and finally most unsuccessful educational gimmicks ever devised; and this book perfectly captures the idiocy of it all. In fairness, the authors were trying to do a good job but their mission is to explain the preposterous. Prefatory copy in this book...

On a forum discussing math instruction, a father talks about his son’s bad experience with REFORM MATH::: “So they call it the ‘Chicago Method,’ eh? Good God, I thought it was just local 5th grade stupidity. This foolishness is national?? My son had a horrific time with this approach. By the time the teacher had spent week FIVE teaching the kids yet ANOTHER way just to do basic division, all the kids who had understood the first method were either bored out of their mind or have forgotten the approach that they DID understand. That whole episode made us (and...

Reading and math scores for New York students in grades three through eight showed extraordinary gains across the state since last year, with particularly striking leaps in the large urban areas, including New York City. The gains were apparent for nearly every grade tested in both subjects, in some cases with double-digit increases in the percentage of students performing at grade level or above, according to the scores on the annual statewide exams released by education officials on Monday. The improvements were so substantial that several education experts expressed skepticism, noting that large gains were posted even by cities like...

Math pop quiz stumps Randi BY ERIN EINHORN DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER Talk about a high-stakes test. The radio audience was live and the question for teachers union president Randi Weingarten involved sixth-grade math: "What's 1/3rd plus 1/4th?"... Mike Pesca, who was filling in for Lehrer, introduced the show's education topic by saying American college grads can't do basic math while high school grads in Canada and middle-schoolers in India have no trouble. After Weingarten stumbled, another guest quickly produced the correct answer: 7/12ths, leaving Weingarten to explain herself.

[Let me begin by expressing my heartfelt condolences to the survivors of our nation's most devastating natural disaster to date. I can't imagine the pain and the loss they must be experiencing.] It's clear that many of the people living in those Mississippi coast towns like Waveland and Ocean Springs and Biloxi and Gulfport were unable to comprehend the magnitude of the danger to their persons and property that Hurricane Katrina represented as it churned towards them. What could these people, and also knowledgeable people in authority, have done to better inform themselves of the threat they faced? For...