Free Republic

Following a growing trend in education called critical mathematics, the Seattle Public School system recently released a framework incorporating ethnic studies into their K-12 mathematics curriculum. It has a noble objective: To reduce the disparity in mathematics achievement between white students and students of color by teaching how different cultures have developed and employed mathematics through time. But instead of equipping students to understand mathematics better so they can succeed, the new framework will leave students less prepared and teaches them a new dangerous lesson: mathematics is a tool of oppression. At least, we think that is the gist of...

Seventy years ago the University of California introduced a loyalty oath, requiring employees to swear they were “not a member of the Communist Party.” After a contentious period in which 31 faculty were fired for refusing to sign, the requirement was reconsidered. An eventual consequence was the current Standing Order of the Regents 101.1(d): “No political test shall ever be considered in the appointment and promotion of any faculty member or employee.” This is a statement of principle. No one will be denied a position at the University of California based on political beliefs. No communist, no conservative, no progressive,...

Take a number, any number. If it’s even, halve it. If it’s odd, multiply by 3 and add 1. Repeat. Do all starting numbers lead to 1? Experienced mathematicians warn up-and-comers to stay away from the Collatz conjecture. It’s a siren song, they say: Fall under its trance and you may never do meaningful work again. The Collatz conjecture is quite possibly the simplest unsolved problem in mathematics — which is exactly what makes it so treacherously alluring. “This is a really dangerous problem. People become obsessed with it and it really is impossible,” said Jeffrey Lagarias, a mathematician at...

It’s a jarring statistic, so much so that it became a talking point among Aspen school board candidates in the runup to the most recent election: At Aspen Elementary School, a mere 41 percent of students were deemed proficient in reading against the state’s standards. “I think this should be an all-hands-on-deck solution now. I suspect there are curriculum alignment issues: it’s not one teacher; it’s not one kid; it’s not one bad day,” newly elected Katy Frisch said during a school board candidate forum in October. “It’s completely unacceptable.” Johnathan Nickell, who won the other open board seat in...

A mathematician at Carnegie Mellon University has developed an easier way to solve quadratic equations. The mathematician hopes this method will help students avoid memorizing obtuse formulas. His secret is in generalizing two roots together instead of keeping them as separate values. ========================================================================== A mathematician has derived an easier way to solve quadratic equation problems, according to MIT's Technology Review. Quadratic equations are polynomials that include an x², and teachers use them to teach students to find two solutions at once. The new process, developed by Dr. Po-Shen Loh at Carnegie Mellon University, goes around traditional methods like completing...

What some observers saw as a bad sign for his newly announced bid to become the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential nominee, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick saw as “an encouraging start on the road to victory.” While only two people showed up to hear him speak at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Patrick pointed out that “this is three times the number of supporters I had last week. If I can sustain this pace I’ll have more than three billion supporters by May of next year and be headed toward a landslide win in the 2020 election.” if you missed any...

Something called the "K–12 Math Ethnic Studies Framework," created by a Seattle Public Schools "Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee," is intended to instruct students that math is intimately connected to racial oppression

The Seattle Public Schools Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee (ESAC) released a rough draft of notes for its Math Ethnic Studies framework in late September, which attempts to connects math to a history of oppression. The framework is broken into four different themes: “Origins, Identity, and Agency,” “Power and Oppression,” “History of Resistance and Liberation,” and “Reflection and Action.” The committee suggests that math is subjective and racist, saying under one section, “Who gets to say if an answer is right,” and under another, “how is math manipulated to allow inequality and oppression to persist?” Jason Rantz of KTTH in Seattle...

A pair of mathematicians from Australia and France have devised an alternative way to multiply numbers together, while solving an algorithmic puzzle that has perplexed some of the greatest math minds for almost half a century. For most of us, the way we multiply relatively small numbers is by remembering our times tables – an incredibly handy aid first pioneered by the Babylonians some 4,000 years ago. But what if the numbers get bigger? Well, if the figures get unwieldy – and assuming we don't have a calculator or computer, of course – most of us would then turn to...

Because the method you learned in middle school is ridiculously slow. Multiplying large numbers is hard. In 1971, two German professors predicted an algorithm that would make it easier, but no one ever proved it. Until now. Mathematicians from Australia and France say their algorithm can make multiplication and other kinds of arithmetic much more efficient. ================================================================ From grade school onward, complex multiplication has been a headache. But an assistant professor from the University of New South Wales Sydney in Australia has developed a new method for multiplying giant numbers together that's more efficient than the "long multiplication" so many...

Some may regard mathematics as a last bastion of academics immune to political correctness, or "wokeness," as some prefer. But an advisory committee wants to warn students in Seattle Public Schools that they have been victims of a racist system that has used math as a tool of oppression, reports Jason Rantz, an afternoon host on KTTH radio in Seattle. he novel approach to the discipline comes from a preliminary "Math Ethnic Studies Framework" produced by an Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee under the Seattle Public Schools superintendent. The proposal laments that "western" math has been viewed as the only "legitimate...

In the future, historians will look back upon the suicide of our civilization and will see this poison for what it is. In Seattle, the city’s public schools have decided that everything, even mathematics, has to be seen through the lens of oppression and racism. Below are actual screenshots from the guidelines for math education there: Read the whole thing here. The young people who are going to learn real math are those whose parents can afford to put them in private schools. The public school kids of all races are going to get dumber and dumber … and this...

The original problem, set in 1954 at the University of Cambridge, looked for Solutions of the Diophantine Equation x3+y3+z3=k, with k being all the numbers from one to 100. Beyond the easily found small solutions, the problem soon became intractable as the more interesting answers—if indeed they existed—could not possibly be calculated, so vast were the numbers required. But slowly, over many years, each value of k was eventually solved for (or proved unsolvable), thanks to sophisticated techniques and modern computers—except the last two, the most difficult of all; 33 and 42. Professors Booker and Sutherland's solution for 42 would...

“8÷2(2+2).” Can you solve this math problem? The equation went viral online this week on Twitter causing major confusion over the right answer. Mathematicians and physicists went nuts about it. Mike Breen, the Public Awareness Officer for the American Mathematical Society, told popular Mechanics: “The way it’s written, it’s ambiguous. In math, a lot of times there are ambiguities. Mathematicians try to make rules as precise as possible.” Depending on where in the world you learned math, as Mashable reported, determines how you can solve the problem.

Recorded on June 6, 2019 in Italy. Based on new evidence and knowledge that functioning proteins are extremely rare, should Darwin’s theory of evolution be dismissed, dissected, developed or replaced with a theory of intelligent design? Has Darwinism really failed? Peter Robinson discusses it with David Berlinski, David Gelernter, and Stephen Meyer, who have raised doubts about Darwin’s theory in their two books and essay, respectively The Deniable Darwin, Darwin’s Doubt, and “Giving Up Darwin” (published in the Claremont Review of Books).

In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. – George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four It’s no secret that leftist educators have utterly ruined the fields of the humanities with their Marxist wokeness, postmodern deconstructionism, and openly anti-Western bias. Now The College Fix reports that educators are increasingly imposing a social...

“Math equity” doesn’t mean 1 + 1 = 2. The term refers to the growing insistence among educators that teaching math in the classroom comes with some inherently biased methodology that must be addressed. Proponents of “math equity” also stress the importance of social justice issues such as race, diversity and gender in math education — a trend that’s catching on. More professors and educators are tweeting under the hashtag #MathEquity to share strategies on the topic, and webinars and other pedagogical sessions on it abound.

The problem with “rights based” arguments, quite honestly, is they go nowhere, because of what government is. Government, at its root, is an exchange of some amount of liberty for some amount of security. It’s a grand bargain. Some governments take more of your liberty, and grant you more security in exchange. Some take more and grant you less security. Some leave you more liberty and grant you less security. Some leave you with a lot of both. And every argument about every government policy can, at its root, be boiled down to an exchange of some amount of liberty...

balance between order and disorder, or entropy, he said. "We can look at a balance—or a competition—between dissonance and entropy of sound—and see that phase transitions can also occur from disordered sound to the ordered structures of music," he said. Berezovsky ... he's uncovering the "emergent structures of musical harmony" inherent in the art, just as order comes from disorder in the physical world. He believes that could mean a whole new way of looking at music of the past, present and future. Berezovsky said his theory is more than just an illustration of how we think about music. Instead,...

Bill Gates is among the richest, most successful people on the planet. He enjoyed a lot of victories until he ventured into a dangerous part of town called Education. He squandered a few billion dollars by becoming entangled with a shady character named Common Core. Since 2010, Gates endured a long, slow defeat, as more people turned against Common Core, and he himself realized that it was not what he had dreamed of. So how did Bill Gates lose his golden touch? Gates, computer man and businessman, trusted data neatly arrayed on monitors. Digital tools could give predictability, consistency, and...