The mathematician Israel Gelfand once said: “The most important thing a student can get from the study of mathematics is the attainment of a higher intellectual level.”1 We might twist this slightly to say that “the most important thing a human being can get from the study of mathematics is an understanding of oneself as […]
Category Archives: Mathematics
Suppose that you pick up a textbook in an unfamiliar branch of mathematics and thumb to a random page. You might find a statement such as: if there are injections f: A-> B and g: B -> A, then there is a bijection h: A -> B1 Such statements probably strike you as utterly mystifying. […]
What is at stake with Common Core mathematics and why is it so potentially harmful if it is just a minimum standard? In Part I of this series, I addressed commonly held beliefs concerning math education prior to the “reforms” of the early twentieth century that led to the math wars. In this post, I […]
“Math is math. I just don’t understand why my kid needs to know five different ways to solve a simple division problem!” Most parents attempting to help their children with math homework over the past decade have expressed this sentiment. In reply, education experts remind everyone that parents said something similar when “New Math” was […]