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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,...

The average performance of the nation’s high school seniors dropped in math from 2013 to 2015, but held steady in reading, according to results of a biennial test released Wednesday. The results, from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also showed a drop in the percentage of students in private and public schools who are considered prepared for college-level work in reading and math. In 2013, the last time the test was given, 39 percent of students were estimated to be ready in math and 38 percent in reading; in 2015, 37 percent were judged prepared in each subject. In...

Donald Trump's final push for the GOP nomination starts Tuesday in New York, where the front-runner is heavily favored over rivals Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. The burning question is not whether Trump wins New York — if he doesn't, it will be among the biggest polling surprises ever — but whether Cruz and Kasich can pick up enough delegates to derail his nomination before July's convention in Cleveland. Since Trump's last victory in Arizona's March 22 primary, Cruz has won a competitive race in Wisconsin, as well as a series of sweeping victories in North Dakota,...

Since the revolt by parents against New York State’s reading and math tests last year, education officials at the state level have been bending over backward to try to show that they are listening to parents’ and educators’ concerns. The tests, which are given to third through eighth graders and will begin this year on April 5, were shortened, time limits were removed, and the results will not be a factor in teacher evaluations, among other changes.

CLEVELAND, Ohio – April 4, 2016 wins a triple crown in the department of cosmic coincidences. The day marks Major League Baseball's Opening Day, the NCAA basketball championship and Square Root Day. All provide potential fodder for math geeks who scrupulously compile baseball stats, slaved over Sweet 16 and Final 4 basketball playoff match-ups, and appreciate a date when both the month and date are the square root of the year's last two digits (4,4,16).

Who needs algebra? That question muttered by many a frustrated student over the years has become a vigorous debate among American educators, sparked by a provocative new book that argues required algebra has become an unnecessary stumbling block that forces millions to drop out of high school or college. “One out of 5 young Americans does not graduate from high school. This is one of the worst records in the developed world. Why? The chief academic reason is they failed ninth-grade algebra,” said political scientist Andrew Hacker, author of “The Math Myth and Other STEM Delusions.” Hacker, a professor emeritus...

A doctoral candidate at the University of North Dakota published a paper suggesting that we should make Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) courses more “inclusive” of women by making then “less competitive,” which is about the most sexist thing I’ve ever heard. “There is an opportunity for STEM courses to reduce the perception of courses as difficult and unfriendly through language use in the syllabi, and also as a guide for how to use less competitive teaching methods and grading profiles that could improve the experience of female students,” Laura Parson wrote in the paper.

Here is "the" math "if": 1. Trump takes 53%,60% or 65% of remaining delegates from 21 states from 3/22 - 6/7; broken down by 11 Winner Take all States, with 597 delegates at stake. And: 2. 10 Proportionately Awarded states with 312 delegates. Trump: 597 Winner Take All 312 Proportional Award @53 @53% ---- ---- 316 Total Delegates 165 Total Delegates 316 Winner Take All 165 Proportional Award ---- 481 Total Delegates +673 Delegates Won Tru 3/15 OR: ---- 1,154 At 53% Remaining Delegates Total Delegates 597 +312 --- 909 Del. Left Winner Take All and Propor. @ 60% ----...

Oxford University professor Sir Andrew Wiles has been awarded the prestigious Abel Prize for his "stunning proof" of Fermat's Last Theorem. Wiles life has been dedicated to the three-century-old theorem which has been his "passion from an early age" after he read “The Last Problem” by ET Bell. His proof was first published in 1994 while working at Princeton University in New Jersey — he will collect the award 22 years later at a ceremony in Oslo in May. The theorem, created in 1637 by French mathematician Pierre de Fermant, says that there are no solutions in integers — or...

A previously unnoticed property of prime numbers seems to violate a longstanding assumption about how they behave. o mathematicians have uncovered a simple, previously unnoticed property of prime numbers — those numbers that are divisible only by 1 and themselves. Prime numbers, it seems, have decided preferences about the final digits of the primes that immediately follow them. Among the first billion prime numbers, for instance, a prime ending in 9 is almost 65 percent more likely to be followed by a prime ending in 1 than another prime ending in 9. In a paper posted online today, Kannan Soundararajan...

A professor found an easier way to study math. Unfortunately, he’s a political scientist. "I propose an alternative to mathematics, what I call numerical literacy, or for lack of a better phrase, adult arithmetic," Andrew Hacker, a professor emeritus of political science at Queens College said in an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education. "It's the kind of thing you need to make sense of everything from corporate reports to the federal budget, or to decide whether it's better to buy or lease a car." "Despite the fact that nearly every young American is made to take algebra and...

"God is a pure mathematician!" declared British astronomer Sir James Jeans. The physical Universe does seem to be organised around elegant mathematical relationships. And one number above all others has exercised an enduring fascination for physicists: 137.03599913. Let me explain. When scientists measure any quantity they must specify the units being used. The speed of light, for example, is either 186,000 or 300,000 depending on whether it is expressed as miles per second or kilometres per second. Likewise your weight might be 150 or 68 according to whether you are measuring in pounds or kilograms. Without knowing the units being...

Mathieu Ossendrijver of Humboldt University in Berlin found the tablet while combing through the collections at the British Museum. The written record gives instructions for estimating the area under a curve by finding the area of trapezoids drawn underneath. Using those calculations, the tablet shows how to find the distance Jupiter has traveled in a given interval of time. Until now, this kind of use of trapezoids wasn't known to exist before the 14th century. ... By 400 B.C. Babylonian astronomers had worked out a coordinate system using the ecliptic, the region of the sky the sun and planets move...

The largest prime number in the world has been discovered in Missouri by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search project, better known as GIMPS. The record breaking number — which, like all primes, can only be divided by itself and one — is a staggering 22 million digits in length. That's 5 million digits longer than the previous record-holder, which was also discovered by GIMPS back in January 2013. If you really want to know, the new biggest Prime in the world starts with a "3" and ends with a "1."

Another Common Core-aligned math problem is going viral. This time a 3rd grade math problem was marked as incorrect even though the student found the correct answer. On the other hand, submissions with the wrong answer have been counted right. The question asked the student to find the result of 5 multiplied by 3, using the "repeated addition strategy." The student wrote "5+5+5" and correctly found the answer to be 15. Apparently, this strategy didn't fit with the Common Core-established method for teaching multiplication, so the teacher punished the student for getting the right answer in a way not prescribed....

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!

The OECD is out with new global rankings of how students in various countries do in reading , science and math .

It's a not-so rosy report card for the nation's schoolchildren. Math scores slipped for fourth and eighth graders over the last two years, and reading grades were not much better, flat for fourth graders and lower for eighth graders, according to the 2015 Nation's Report Card. ... Education Secretary Arne Duncan urged parents, teachers, and others not to panic about the scores as states embrace higher academic standards, such as Common Core.

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...

Here's a "repeated addition" Common Core problem that's taught in third grade in US schools: Use the repeated-addition strategy to solve: 5x3 If you answer the question with "5+5+5=15,” you would be wrong. The correct answer is "3+3+3+3+3.” Mathematically, both are correct. But under Common Core, you're supposed to read "5x3" as "five groups of three." So "three groups of five" is wrong. According to Common Core defenders, this method will be useful when students do more advanced math. This way of reading things, for instance, can be used when students learn matrices in multivariable calculus in high school. But...