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Hundreds of N.J. students who can't do simple math were credited with passing calculus, according to a report on APP.com. According to a Department of Education report, "there were other students, unable ultimately to evidence even simple math skills, who were unimaginably recorded by their schools as succeeding in Algebra II or even Calculus." A report delivered at today's state Board of Education meeting will recommend four new policies to aid students who weren't proficient enough in reading, writing or math to meet state graduation standards.

Exploring the respected notion of higher “general education” in America, the American Counsel of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) set WhatWillTheyLearn.com in motion, a project aimed at evaluating major public and private colleges and universities on seven key areas of knowledge; English composition, foreign language, literature, U.S. government or history, economics, mathematics, and the sciences. ACTA, an independent and non-profit organization, upholds to the standards of “academic freedom, excellence, and accountability” of America’s schools while releasing accurate rankings. Such a task is especially important during this time of rising tuition costs and economic uncertainty. This online, college ranking guide is currently...

A group of middle school students gather around a dining room table after a day of school work discussing the question, “How many integers between 500 and 1000 contain both the digits 3 and 4?” While some are busily writing out notes on scratch paper and consulting their TI-84 graphing calculators, one student picks up a marker on to a white board propped in the corner. “Here, let me show you …..,” he says. more

Parents of middle school aged children may want to be aware that the national MathCounts Foundation has changed the rules for homeschoolers this year. MathCounts provides an opportunity for 6th through 8th grade students to compete in academic problem solving and mathematical competitions which may be of particular interest to gifted middle schoolers.

Initially hailed as a solution to the biggest question in computer science, the latest attempt to prove P ≠ NP – otherwise known as the "P vs NP" problem – seems to be running into trouble. Two prominent computer scientists have pointed out potentially "fatal flaws" in the draft proof by Vinay Deolalikar of Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California. Since the 100-page proof exploded onto the internet a week ago, mathematicians and computer scientists have been racing to make sense of it. The problem concerns the speed at which a computer can accomplish a task such as factorising a...

Taken very literally, not all students are created equal -- especially in their math learning skills, say Texas A&M University researchers who have found that not fully understanding the "equal sign" in a math problem could be a key to why U.S. students underperform their peers from other countries in math. "About 70 percent of middle grades students in the United States exhibit misconceptions, but nearly none of the international students in Korea and China have a misunderstanding about the equal sign, and Turkish students exhibited far less incidence of the misconception than the U.S. students," note Robert M. Capraro...

INFURIATING Scott G. McNealy has never been easier. Just bring up math textbooks. Mr. McNealy, the fiery co-founder and former chief executive of Sun Microsystems, shuns basic math textbooks as bloated monstrosities: their price keeps rising while the core information inside of them stays the same. “Ten plus 10 has been 20 for a long time,” Mr. McNealy says. Early this year, Oracle, the database software maker, acquired Sun for $7.4 billion, leaving Mr. McNealy without a job. He has since decided to aim his energy and some money at Curriki, an online hub for free textbooks and other course...

Inside the world of Grigory Perelman: the man who solved the world's toughest maths problem proves to be a puzzle himself. He has been called "the cleverest man in the world" and shook academia to its foundations when he announced he had solved a fiendish mathematical problem that had baffled the planet's best brains for a century. Yet Grigory Perelman, a 43-year-old Russian mathematician, has consciously spurned plaudits and wealth to subsist like a hermit. He lives in a 2-bedroom flat with his elderly mother in a dilapidated Soviet-era tower block in St. Petersburg, while neighbours complain that his own...

A fifth-grade Prosper math teacher whose truck was struck by lightning this weekend said he's going to turn it into a lesson plan. The shock tore up a stretch of road along the Dallas North Tollway near U.S. 380. “We’re going to do the odds on this," said Russell Babb. "I got to figure out with the kids, what the odds are of your teacher getting struck by lightning." Babb, who was driving to meet his brother for lunch, said it sounded like a bomb. Concrete flew everywhere, he said. “It chopped up the cement like a sledgehammer,” he said....

Reclusive Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman, who MOSCOW (AFP) – Reclusive Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman, who shot to global fame after claiming to solve the seemingly intractable Poincare conjecture, has refused another prize for the achievement. The Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) said Thursday that Perelman informed the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based research center that he would not accept its million-dollar prize. "I have turned down (the award)," Perelman told the Interfax news agency by telephone. "The main reason is disagreement with the organised mathematics community. I do not like their decisions, I consider them unfair." "I think that the contribution of American mathematician...

My neighbors are thinking of homeschooling, three girls, 3rd, 5th and 6th grade. They asked my advice about online curriculum and resources, especially in math and grammar. Any suggestions, links and experiences most welcome.

Walter Rudin, a preeminent mathematician who taught at UW-Madison for 32 years, died Thursday at the age of 89 after suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Rudin’s advanced work on mathematical analysis may have been of interest to only a small worldwide audience, but his three textbooks were translated into multiple languages and used by generations of college students. “Especially because of his textbooks, he was known universally among undergraduates and graduates studying mathematics,” said Alexander Nagel, a colleague in the UW-Madison math department. Rudin was born in Vienna, Austria, on May 2, 1921, to a prosperous Jewish family. His family fled...

June 1, 2010 Guildford, Surrey, England - Richard Andrews was staring at Lucy Pringle's aerial photograph (above) on his computer screen after midnight on Sunday, May 23, 2010. Richard is a freelance web designer and administrator who was born 46 years ago in Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire county about thirty miles west of London. After high school in 1982, Richard first worked for a year on a degree in environmental psychology at the University of Surrey. Then he went to Africa to work on a game reserve. By 1994, he had earned a Diploma in Heritage Interpretation from the University of...

A crop circle measuring some 300 feet diameter has appeared in a field of oil seed rape near Wilton Windmill in Wiltshire, England. The pattern of dashes and spaces against each of the lines coming out of the centre forms the binary code for symbols and letters of the alphabet which feature in Euler’s Identity, a complex formula devised by the 18th Century Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler. Lucy Pringle, crop circle researcher and author says: “I believe it contains binary. Working from the centre outwards, people are suggesting it has a connection to Leonhard Euler’s theorem e^(i)pi+1=0 which is thought...

You know how bad math classes have become. What makes it worse is that politics have crept into the classroom. Here is an example of an actual math-quiz problem, quoted in Foreign Policy (linked from a story we did two years ago): In 2004, a bread roll cost 40 cents. For the wheat that went into it, the farmer received less than 2 cents. What do you think about that? This question might have preserved some semblance to math had it required the student to do some figuring. Where’s the math? I’m not even sure what the politics are, since...

Palo Alto's new elementary school math curriculum gets mixed reviews from parents, according to results of a recent survey. A survey of teachers also found disagreement as to the new program's effectiveness and ease of use. Fifty-five percent of teachers responding to the survey agreed with the statement, "I have found the Everyday Math materials to be an improvement to our elementary math program," while 45 percent disagreed. A greater number of parents (52 percent) are regularly helping their children with math homework than a year ago (46 percent), according to the 472 parents who responded to the 2010 Elementary...

Our Education Establishment is dumbing us down. How sad, sick, and pathetic. People calling themselves “educators” devote their careers to making sure no one is educated. Everyone has heard the complaints. But the fascinating question still remains: HOW DO THEY DO IT? Is it all just bumbling incompetence or do these people have secret techniques? One familiar technique is to remove content whenever possible from the schools. All right, that technique we can see. But for many years I’ve had the sense that deeper and weirder shenanigans were going on, but I couldn’t pinpoint them. Now I think I can....

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...

In 1929, the superintendent of schools in Ithaca, New York, sent out a challenge to his colleagues in other cities. "What," he asked, "can we drop from the elementary school curriculum?" He complained that over the years new subjects were continuously being added and nothing was being subtracted, with the result that the school day was packed with too many subjects and there was little time to reflect seriously on anything. This was back in the days when people believed that children shouldn't have to spend all of their time at school work--that they needed some time to play, to...