TED
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2012–2020
19:20 · 363K views · Nov 15, 2010
Conrad Wolfram argues that the part of math taught in schools, hand calculation, is tedious and mostly irrelevant to real mathematics. He proposes teaching math through computer programming so students can tackle real problems.
Cited in HN discussions of math and CS education reform as an argument that school math is boring because it is taught wrong.
3 comments from Hacker News
There's a few problems with the article. The rules argument he makes could instead be made for the more useful field of computer programming. Also, the reductionist paradigm is dead. It worked for finding laws of physics and some chemistry, but otherwise, in the most useful fields of today, like biology/materials/chemistry (high throughput methods), computer vision, search engines etc. the automated creation of hypotheses through machine learning is winning out. Conrad Wolfram gives a talk about the need for math education reform this video He uses the term mathematics, but completely removing that term and replacing it with computer programming and machine learning should be done. They sound cooler and this step will remove all the baggage and ill-will mathematics has in society. That way, all mathematics teachers can be simply removed from high schools and colleges and replaced with computer programmers. Estonia is one of the few enlightened places on this subject with their introduction of programming as mandatory from year 1 in k12. Almost the entire high school drop out rate can be attributed to maths teaching, and their is no solid empirical proof of it's utility over programming (the practice of "science" hasn't been applied to "maths" itself). [LINK] The same argument can be made for a number of other subjects, such as chemistry (why teach the periodic table?), languages (we have google translate and should taxpayers be funding this unproductive activity), and others (ev
But isn't maths boring at school because we're teaching it wrong? See Conrad Wolfram's TED Talk: this video
Stephen Wolfram is well known in the industry as being a pompous, self-indulgent man. There was an old joke I heard which went: > Q: How do you know if Stephen Wolfram invented something? > A: He'll tell you. I saw a TED talk by Conrad Wolfram about using Mathematica as an educational tool [1]. I went to one of my tutorials and tried to discuss it with the Professor (we were encouraged to bring up basically anything we'd seen or encountered in our first few weeks of uni). His response was "I don't think we need to worry about what Conrad Wolfram is saying." By all accounts, Stephen and Conrad Wolfram are clever men. It is without a doubt that Mathematica is an extraordinary piece of software. Many people here will have benefitted from Wolfram Alpha and will have used Mathematica either in an academic context or in an engineering context. Stephen Wolfram, however, is not Christ, even though he likes to think so. [1] this video