Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Dr. Willie Soon, Campus Reform; According to the Mathematical Society of America, the largest body of mathematicians in the world, mathematics carries “inherent human biases” which can only be addressed by “engaging in critical, challenging, sometimes uncomfortable conversations about the detrimental effects of race and racism on our community.”
ANTI-SCIENCE POLICY AND THE CENSURE OF DISCOURSE ON RACE AND RACISM
October 2, 2020
A statement from the MAA Committee on Minority Participation in Mathematics
We stand in the midst of a year of transitions. We have long been aware of broad shifts in the postsecondary education landscape, but 2020 has also been marked by the COVID-19 pandemic and emergency distance/online/hybrid teaching. Each of these new challenges for higher education has evolved alongside a movement to stand up for Black lives. The data are clear: these issues are inseparable. Black, Latinx, and Indigenous lives are the most affected by policing, health, and education policies.
Policy must be informed by facts and science. Thanks to science and mathematics, we understand now that masks, social distancing, frequent, rapid, mass testing, and contact tracing are all fundamental to keep our communities safer during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet policies at the federal level have not consistently reflected these facts; for example, choosing not to incorporate a mask-mandate in the US has had serious consequences. As Michael Dorff and Michael Pearson stated in a recent Math Values blog, “We encourage MAA members, regardless of political persuasion, to speak out for the value of science and mathematics, and hold our leaders accountable to make use of the best possible scientific evidence in policy decisions.” The social sciences are part of this community, helping us understand how to effectively communicate these practices to people, while also simultaneously analyzing our practices and policies with a critical lens. Critical race theory, referenced in recent Executive statements by the President of the United States, is an established social science inquiry which is grounded in decades of scholarship. It is misguided, at best, to reduce this theory to the race-blaming of white people and to define it and the discussion of systemic racism as a “divisive concept.” Furthermore, banning training utilizing this scholarship to raise consciousness, from federal and federal contractor workplaces, is an encroachment on science and the academy. At the first presidential debate this year, President Trump’s refusal to disavow white nationalism and his encouragement of groups that the FBI has identified as the greatest threats of domestic terrorism, only serves to reinforce the sense that his administration seeks to reverse decades of progress on civil rights for all citizens. These actions frame a current United States leadership that consistently promotes policy in direct opposition to data and science-based evidence.
Although mathematics, science, and higher education develop fact-based theories and practices that should inform policy, they are also political because they exist within a highly politicized system. Acknowledging that the United States has serious systemic discrimination has somehow leaped from a political issue to a partisan issue. More alarmingly, what we see is a series of pronouncements apparently designed to suppress conversation and action on race and racism in the United States. The American Educational Research Association recently released a statement that clearly addresses this troubling pattern of the federal response to racial justice unrest in the US, which reframes the conversation on race and racism as “unAmerican.” We borrow from and add to their list of recent, deliberate actions taken by the federal government:
- A September 4th Executive Memorandum to all Executive Departments and Agencies states that “all agencies are directed to begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on “critical race theory,” “white privilege,” or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil. In addition, all agencies should begin to identify all available avenues within the law to cancel any such contracts and/or to divert Federal dollars away from these unAmerican propaganda training sessions.”
- On September 6th, President Trump tweeted that the Department of Education was investigating schools using the 1619 project – a Pulitzer-Prize winning project meant to help fill a gap in mid-20th century US history by providing educational materials on slavery – and would withdraw funding.
- The September 16th launch of a Department of Education investigation into Princeton University weaponized a recent letter from Princeton’s President describing Princeton’s efforts to move forward with structural reform in response to reflection on their past. “On September 2, 2020, you admitted Princeton’s educational program is and for decades has been racist. Among other things, you said “[r]acism and the damage it does to people of color persist at Princeton …” and “[r]acist assumptions…remain embedded in structures of the University itself.”
- The September 22nd Executive Order is framed by a preamble centering white men as being hurt by blame for racism in the US, which effectively extends the September 4th ban on racial equity training to all Federal contractors. It then defines a list of “divisive concepts” which, for example, includes the idea that the meritocracy is “racist or sexist, or were created by a particular race to oppress another race, as well as new terms such as “race and sex stereotyping” and “race and sex scapegoating” which seek to renarrate white fragility as racism against white people.
- The September 28th Executive memorandum, which directs Federal funding agencies to “identify all programs for which the agency may, as a condition of receiving Federal grants and cooperative agreements, require the recipient to certify that it will not use Federal funds to promote the list of concepts listed in Section 5 of the[September 22nd] Executive Order.”
As mathematicians, we notice patterns – this is something we are all trained to do. We bring these Executive actions to our community’s attention for several reasons: we see the pattern of science being ignored and the pattern of violence against our colleagues that give voice to race and racism. We need to fight against these patterns. As educators, we also recognize the threatening pattern of banning education and withdrawing education funding to suppress conversations on race and racism, extending from elementary to postsecondary institutions to the workplace and research spheres.
It is time for all members of our profession to acknowledge that mathematics is created by humans and therefore inherently carries human biases. Until this occurs, our community and our students cannot reach full potential. Reaching this potential in mathematics relies upon the academy and higher education engaging in critical, challenging, sometimes uncomfortable conversations about the detrimental effects of race and racism on our community. The time is now to move mathematics and education forward in pursuit of justice.
Math Community Members:
Carrie Diaz Eaton, Chair, Committee for Minority Participation in Mathematics
Francesca Bernardi, Committee for Minority Participation in Mathematics
Christopher Goff, Committee for Minority Participation in Mathematics
Kamuela Yong, Committee for Minority Participation in Mathematics
Margaret Reese, Committee for Minority Participation in Mathematics
Michael Pearson, Executive Director, MAA
Michael Dorff, President of the MAA
Deirdre Longacher Smeltzer, Senior Director for Programs, MAA
Victor Piercey, Chair of the Michigan Section of the MAA
Jenna Carpenter, Co-Chair, Joint Committee on Women in the Mathematical Sciences
Nancy Sattler, member AMATYC, MAA, TPSE, & Joint Committee on Women in the Mathematical Sciences
Kathryn Kozak, AMATYC President
Anne Dudley, AMATYC Executive Director
Yun Kang, AMS representative for Joint Committee on Women in the Mathematical Sciences
Omayra Ortega, Editor-in-Chief of the NAM newsletter and NAM representative for Joint Committee on Women in the Mathematical Sciences
Jennifer Quinn, President-Elect of the MAA
James A. M. Álvarez, MAA Board of Directors & MAA Congress Representative for Minority Interests
Marilyn Elaine Mays, Joint Committee on Women in the Mathematical SciencesSource: https://www.mathvalues.org/masterblog/anti-science-policy-censure-of-discourse-on-race-and-racism
Wikipedia provides the following definition of Critical Race Theory;
Critical race theory (CRT)[1] is a theoretical framework in the social sciences that examines society and culture as they relate to categorizations of race, law, and power.[2][3] It is loosely unified by two common themes. Firstly, CRT proposes that white supremacy and racial power are maintained over time, and in particular, that the law may play a role in this process. Secondly, CRT work has investigated the possibility of transforming the relationship between law and racial power, as well as pursuing a project of achieving racial emancipation and anti-subordination more broadly.[4] Developed out of postmodern philosophy[citation needed], it is based on critical theory, a social philosophy that argues that social problems are influenced and created more by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and psychological factors. It began as a theoretical movement within American law schools in the mid- to late 1980s as a reworking of critical legal studies on race issues.
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory
If there is evidence a mathematician has not received proper recognition for their work because of racism, politics, religious bigotry, or any number of other reasons, by all means correct the record and give people the recognition they deserve.
But suggesting mathematics itself is racist, as MAA appears to be doing, is a pretty big claim. To quote Carl Sagan, An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof. I would like to see examples of racist mathematics. The statement provided by MAA does not appear to provide any evidence to substantiate their claim of inherent racism.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I am not a mathematician, and I believe I am aware that my logic might be slipping sometimes due to my bias. And that might also be happening here. I read this: “It is time for all members of our profession to acknowledge that mathematics is created by humans and therefore inherently carries human biases. Until this occurs, our community and our students cannot reach full potential.”
I find it hard to understand that if you think mathematics itself is biased by human traits, then humans will remove this bias because they are…human.
Is there a human bias in the choice of calling the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter Pi? I guess there is. Would anything be different if it was called anything else? I thought the number “e” was named after Euler, and that might be human bias right there. Although I fail to see how the choice of name for this number affects the number or the logic surrounding it. But then I am white, middle class, in my 50’s and probably have absolutely no way of understanding my shortcomings here.
Are there any members here belonging to the group who wrote this and who care enough to try and help me with this?
If they actually meant to say that “It is time for all members of our profession to acknowledge that THE MATHEMATICAL COMMUNITY is created by humans and therefore inherently carries human biases”, well then that is different. Being mathematicians they might be forgiven on semantics. It is still logically confusing that they think awareness of this would somehow remove human bias.
Interesting statement: ” … to acknowledge that [M]athematics is created by humans and therefore inherently carries human biases.”
So funny: I teach all of my Math students that we DISCOVERED Mathematics; we did not create anything, anymore than we created things like gravity, and electromagnetism, and drifting continents.
This single statement, that we ‘created’ Mathematics, completely discredits this institution as anything but a bunch of losers looking to justify their own existence. So glad I never joined such a pathetic group.
Regards to all,
Vlad
+1000
White supremacists did not create the universe.
As a mathematician I can justify a claim that math was created.
Ultimately, mathematics is a branch of philosophy (not science, it’s not at all empirical, no experiment will ever disprove a theorem). It is specifically the branch of philosophy that deals with rigorous logic applied to an axiomatic system. The particular axioms usually chosen are somewhat arbitrary and different axioms are possible and sometimes used.
Once you have chosen your axioms, any particular result is simply a discovery rather than a creation, but the entire edifice of axioms is in fact chosen and constructed. Choosing axioms can be an act of creation as there is no “correct” set of axioms to discover. For a non-trivial system of mathematics there will always be either undecidable problems which can only be solved by introducing a new axiom, or self-contradictions. We reject internally contradictory sets of axioms, but this is a choice, as is the set of axioms worked with, and other choices are possible and are not in any way mathematically proven to be inferior.
I happen to strongly prefer axioms that give results in some way applicable to the real world. But that’s just my choice and my preference. If someone wants to call this racist on my part, I can hardly claim that they are mathematically incorrect. I can just claim that they are morons and that I’m glad I don’t contribute or belong to their organization.
Douglas
Is it possible that if one chooses the wrong axioms, which lead to “internally contradictory sets of axioms,” that no progress can be made or answers provided to questions? If so, then it would seem that one who would choose such axioms is not guided by reality or a desire to expand knowledge.
“It is time for all members of our profession to acknowledge that mathematics is created by humans and therefore inherently carries human biases.”
Some mathematicians believe that mathematics is discovered, (Platonists). Others believe that mathematics is created by humans, (Formalists). Since such ideas are in the realm of mathematical philosophy, and thus not subject to any rigorous system of mathematical proof, the MAA is just spouting belief systems – not rigorous mathematical proofs.
“Is there a human bias in the choice of calling the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter Pi?”
I think it’s more “meta” than that. I think the fact of determining there IS a consistent ratio for the circumference of a circle to its diameter is somehow racist, whether it was called pi or t’pau.
How can something that only expresses relationships be racist, or even biased?
I’m old enough to remember when math was considered the “universal language.” Such that a spacecraft included math inscriptions should any aliens ever intercept it.
Oh well. That was then. This is…? Stupidity on steroids.
Racist mathematics, who knew?…I always had my doubts about logarithms, all those dense columns of suspicion looking numbers…
Yeah Modern mathematics is Islamic, and it doesn’t come much racister than that these days.
i. i is the one that terrifies me. How can that thing exist and be useful in real-world problems?
I’ve always suspected that i is a clue from God that the Universe it not what it seems.
Leibniz referred to i as the divine spirit.
I’ve always had a thing against Logarithms Napier because he’s Scottish.
Mathematics racist?
Nah, just that ****ers can’t do sums?
Joking apart, much as I despise all this emphasis on race, the fact of the matter is that people from northern latitudes had to work harder and develop more complex ideas and organisations in order to stay alive. Mathematics – which is probably down to the great Arab scholars of the middle ages – is just one of those complexities.
North America Europe and Asia simply have high population densities and a greater material wealth than say Africa, because they developed more sophisticated ideas. Whether or not those ideas are ‘racial’ or ‘racist’, the fact is that every day immigrants are streaming into those places because they want some of that material wealth and then screaming that the culture, mathematics, technology, and science that created it is ‘racist’ and ‘oppressive’.
Well guys, Africa is over there ==>
and South America is down there||
v
“Crackers”, like any other disparaged group, have the ability to learn and do sums.
They just don’t want to.
Priorities …. How good are you at fisting catfish?
This is indeed worrying. The MAA publishes at least a very good journal. However, let me remark that the mad discourse referred in the post comes from a fringe (hopefully) committee inside the association: MAA Committee on Minority Participation in Mathematics. It is not highlighted in the web page of MAA at least for the moment. Note also that the correct name is Mathematical Association of America.
Luis Rodrigues,
The document may have been drafted by a “fringe committee,” but it is signed by:
Michael Pearson, Executive Director, MAA
Michael Dorff, President of the MAA
Deirdre Longacher Smeltzer, Senior Director for Programs, MAA
Jennifer Quinn, President-Elect of the MAA
Kathryn Kozak, AMATYC President (American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges)
Anne Dudley, AMATYC Executive Director
Top management often goes corrupt, happening in a number of organizations. American Scientist published by Sigma Xi, National Research Honor Society, was confused with Scientific American, got a lot of pushback, had to deny endorsements. However, top was also pushing political agendas for scientists, membership may be waking up. Not all is lost. AMS doesn’t seem to know about ASA. Caution about numbers is not new, maybe needs rediscovery.
Smith, E.P. Ending Reliance on Statistical Significance Will Improve Environmental Inference and Communication. Estuaries and Coasts 43, 1–6 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12237-019-00679-y
Beninger, P. G., I. Boldina and S. Katsanevakis. 2012. Strengthening statistical usage in marine ecology. J. Experimental Marine Biology Ecology. 426-427. 97-108. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jembe.2012.05.020
https://amstat.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00031305.2016.1154108
p-values
As noted below, the REAL atrocity is that the “MAA Committee on Minority Participation” is no longer focused on steps and programs to get minorities interested and involved in math (and other STEM areas) but is now WOKE and assumes that simply attributing that concern to “racism” is some sort of a solution!
(Whitey, it’s all your fault; now go fix it!)
Like many “science” issues the causes of lack of “minority participation” are many, complex and inter-related. Put on your Big Boy (or Girl) pants and get to work!
Well, isn’t calculus based on differences? Therefore it must be intrinsically racial.
differential calculus. They have abandoned integral calculus.
Worse than that, Joel. Mathematics actually involves a discriminant.
Kevin
Color me skeptical!
Yes, mathematics is racist.
But on the other side mathematics is a product of white culture.
Therefore colored people should not use it, since that would be appropiation of white culture and we all know that cultural appropiation is not OK.
So non-white people keep you hands of our culture!
The return to the Western Dark Ages via anti-Enlightenment continues apace like a malignant cancer.
The Chinese and Russians are laughing their butts off. They had their turn with this ignorant mindset in the 20th Century. Now they see it as the West’s turn.
“The return to the Western Dark Ages via anti-Enlightenment continues apace…” Sure. It happens every couple of hundred years. When too much knowledge filters down to the masses too fast they destroy the knowledge makers & keepers.
There is too high of a high probability that these folks may takeover the US government soon. It won’t end well. Unless the Lord gives us another reprieve.
At this point I think it’s inevitable, it’s just a matter of when. Orwell’s “vision of the future” seems to have been accurate.
The “Math Community” of the “MAA Committee on Minority Participation in Mathematics” consists, as far as I can make out from the names, of 5 men and 13 women. There’s scope for some “affirmative action” right there.
I’m a woman Neil and I thought the same thing. Feminism became extreme a very long time ago. These people are are attaching their ideology to absolutely everything and there is no rhyme or reason.
There is a reason. They “achieved” their positions in a manner that did not depend primarily on merit.
Now, they can’t compete or feasible contribute to the the status of their position, so they do other things … things that are easier to do while at the same time provide excuse as to why they aren’t still succeding.
Well said.
I am often ignorant of the facts and theories involved in many of the discussions on WUWT, but I do have extensive post-secondary training in Math, and I know that Math is true. Math would exist even if there were no people to understand it, or invent the terms and procedures we use to describe it. Before the invention of logarithms the laws that govern their use existed and could not be denied. As far as I know, no ne has ever falsified a recognized Math theorem. There is no postmodernist Math.
An interesting thing about Math is that the huge bulk of it was invented before the year 1700. Mathematicians are haunted by the possibility that there may be no more Math to discover.
What could possibly be the basis of the claim that Math is racist? That would be like saying that gravity is racist. It’s just nuts.
This is just gibberish to be able to fill the mathematics departments with wokeness instead of competence.
Something more of interest to those who are still interested in actual mathematics – what do you tell school kids who want to know why they need to learn mathematics?
The ones asking don’t need to. The ones not asking it do.
The very few who will need to learn it properly need to be in a class that is taking the subject seriously even if most students know that it’s not their thing.
What’s in it for the majority in the class who don’t need to learn it?
Society is a better place if you help the few with apptitude and enjoyment of it to learn it properly.
Most jobs are you just doing what the boss wants with little understanding of it. Practice being good at it.
You know that boss/team leader/foreman that your parent complains about being too superficial to do the job properly – you want to be that person and not the one complaining. You don’t want it to be rife in society, though.
Everybody is better off if they are competent in arithmetic, so you get to practice that. Just learn the mathematics superficially, but play along with the teaching that is meant for the few with talent. You will not pick the latter by their skin colour, accent or genitals, just how they go about doing the work.
Everyone is better off if they have at least a basic understanding of geometry and trigonometry as well as arithmetic.
Carpenters use trig all the time, e.g. calculating angles for roof trusses and widths of stair treads. Welders need to understand geometry to determine the best joint and welding technique to use. Surveyors use math all the time. Even a ditch digger installing a septic lateral needs to understand basic trig to get the drainage right. House painters need to understand how to calculate area in order to estimate paint quantity needed.
There are vey few jobs where a basic understanding of math isn’t needed except perhaps a cashier at McDonalds.
Hello, Tim Gorman. I disagree that most people need Math beyond what you take by Grade 9. I used to pick up a few extra bucks as a Math tutor. I coached high school students, with the goal being to get them a passing grade in Grade 12 Math. The reason this was necessary (in western Canada) is that admittance to a university requires a passing grade in Grade 12 Math.
There are a lot of people with IQs of about 120, who would be capable of getting a degree in a liberal art, who have major troubles understanding Mathematical reasoning. What you do with young people like that is, you get them to understand that they’re not bad or stupid because they don’t get Math, anymore than they would be bad or stupid if they couldn’t learn how to sing. Then you teach them how to recognize the problems and identify the procedures they need to get the right answers to them. Basically they learn the procedures by rote, but they don’t really understand why it works.
There is a lot cruelty in the education system for so many people. I was a clever boy and did well in school, without too much in the way of effort, but many of my classmates suffered terribly in school because it was difficult for them. The education system harms kids like that by destroying their confidence, and slamming them with shame when they’re young and defenseless, and it’s a dirty trick.
I don’t get Shakespeare. In high school, and in the mandatory English course I had to take in first year university. everybody had to read either Macbeth or Julius Caesar. For me, these were exercises in tedium, and perfectly useless on any practical level.( This was a quite a common view, incidentally. I have yet to meet a human being who has actually read a Shakespeare play on his own, without the goad of some sort of external reward or punishment, like passing a course. ) The education system does that to young people. It loads them up with arbitrary and difficult tasks, like some sort of malicious hazing ritual.
I somewhat understand where you are coming from as I too am a math and science tutor. However, a lot of people do need to understand some of the basics of algebra, geometry, and perhaps trigonometry. Heck, many of my students need comprehensive help doing fractions. How many 8ths are in an inch? “I dunno know!”
Whether they remember the exact steps to solve an equation or not, the concept has been introduced and they have a better idea of what it means to and how to calculate when to stop for gas on a long trip.
I also meant to add that I understand your comment about Shakespeare. My junior English teacher had us read parts of “The Taming of the Shrew”. How boring! But she also got the school to cough up for a trip to see the movie with Elizabeth Taylor. Suddenly it made a lot of sense. I don’t think Shakespeare wrote his plays to be read. They were to be performed. You could see the motivations and under stand the emotions.
Hello Jim. I saw Taming of the Shrew with Dick and Liz myself. Didn’t understand a word. I spent the whole movie looking at Taylor’s breast cleavage. II was seventeen at the time.)
Every now and then I get unwisely optimistic and go to a movie of a Shakespeare play. Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet (with Mel Gibson). Same damn thing every time, which is that I cannot make out what the characters are saying, because they’re speaking archaic English. Notice, however, that you can understand and appreciate Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde, because the actors are speaking your language.
On a similar note, let’s see you read James Joyce’ Ulysses which, according to all kinds of big brains, is the greatest novel ever written. They’ve got to be faking. The whole thing reads like practical joke on the reader.
One of the most entertaining books I have half-read was Calculous and Analytic Geometry, by Douglas Riddle. I do not go around telling other people that they have a duty to their better selves to read this book, since I know that most people wouldn’t like it, or even understand it. But meet some guy who has read Ulysses and he’ll tell you that you’ll absolutely love it, or be exposed as a cretin.
Math is another language with pretty tight rules for the grammar.
If you don’t get the basics of the Shakespearian language, then you are gonna have a hard time with it. If you are linear, you are gonna get hung up on a term (dost, marry, or pray) and the next five words are gonna put your brain into a collapsing loop.
Same with math. One simple term (say pi … for some youngsters) that doesn’t IMMEDIATELY register is going to delay cognition and they go into brain freeze.
“How many 8th are in an inch?” I don’t know what a “th” is so my brain gets stuck and we will need 5 minutes to un-stuck it … unless you follow up, simply and slowly, with “an 8th is 8 pieces; a 4th is four pieces; a 16th is 16 EQUAL pieces … NOW, how many 4th’s are in an inch?”
Help them out with the translation from english to math.
(But before any of that, before they can even talk, get them puzzles to put together. That little cube with 6 or so pieces that fit together into a 3x3x3 cube. When they get older you can even us it to introduce them to calculus)
Respectfully, show me the procedure to calculate the riser height and tread width to build a stair that meets the customers requirements. Show me the procedure to to calculate the angles and lengths of a rafter to meet a ridge beam or cantilever strut to strengthen the turss. Someone manufacturing pre-designed trusses may have a pre-made fixture to use but an independent journeyman carpenter needs to understand how a truss works and the ability to determine the needed lengths and angles associated with the truss when building a one-off building for a customer. Failure to do this results in hit-and-miss trials and wasting of a lot of lumber.
I’ll say it again. If a student is unable to learn basic math, including geometry and trig, then they will probably be condemned to forever work in repetitive tasks, think McDonalds cashier or automotive assembly line, never able to become an independent worker. Sadly that seems to be more and more common with young people today.
I don’t think so Tim. Most people never work at a job where they have to, say, factor a binomial equation. Also, most tradespeople, like carpenters, work from plans. It is no great task to build a truss support from a plan. Only the designer of the truss support has to understand truss theory, with all the math that that requires. If you’re an engineer, well, you need a lot of Math, but I know people who have tech school diplomas in things like land surveying, or who are electricians, and they have zero use for calculus at all. Even being an accountant requires no more Math than most people have learned by the end of Grade 10,
My own experience in life is that about 80 percent of the material grown-ups make you learn in high school has been of no practical use in my adult life. It was just something to keep you busy so you wouldn’t get a girl pregnant.
Universities are strange contraptions because they are based on hierarchies of skill at acquiring and manipulating knowledge, even though much of the knowledge is of no practical value. I really can’t understand the logic of making young people read plays written in the sixteenth century. I suspect that most Liberal Arts professors don’t either, so they add a leaven of moral teaching on things like social justice to their courses, which lends the impression that they are teaching young people something of real value, that will make their students good citizens, and the world a better place.
Basic math? yes, not knowing basic math is a major drawback in life and in getting a decent job. Higher math (like geometry and trig)? not as much. Most jobs simply don’t require those skill sets. How many accountants need to work with formulas involving sine and cosine? How Many CEOs need to know what “pi R squared” is let alone what it would be used for? How many brain surgeons need to factor a binomial or know what a cosecant is?
Don’t get me wrong, those are important skills that are needed for some jobs, just not skills that are important to everyone’s life and job prospects. Most people can do quite well in life without ever learning anything about trig.
Ian,
“Also, most tradespeople, like carpenters, work from plans.”
There are lots of independent tradespeople that don’t work from plans. I watched the carpenter I hired design my deck and stairs with no plans. Same for my garden shed.
I never once mentioned calculus. Stop moving the goalposts.
If you don’t think geometry and trig are important then you’ve never watched a ditch digger lay out a septic lateral line. Or a true painting pro figure out how many gallons of paint he will do to do a job.
Hello, Tim. As I recall it, I had learned quite a bit of Euclidian geometry by the end of Grade 9. That would be all you’d need to build a house. Framing carpenters, for example, know that rectangles must have two equal diagonals. I once worked for a man who framed houses, and that’s how he ensured that he had right angles at the corners of the frames. I doubt if he ever used a trigonometric identity in his life, or even knew what sine and tangent were.
Land surveying, on the other hand requires a fairly sophisticated knowledge of trigonometry. The cosine law is a useful thing to know, for example.
I’m not sure if practical electricians use much math at all, although they obviously need a sophisticated understanding of electrical circuitry.
How about auto mechanics? How much math would you need to know to fix cars? That’s a job that takes years of training and practical experience, but I doubt if you need much math to do it.
My point: Most high school students learn far more math they will ever need in real life, and for a lot of kids math classes are just a cruel trick foisted on them by adults, many of whom have a superstitious belief that all young people must be taught math in order for societies to be modern and competitive.
Drifting off the topic a little, the two classes I took in high school that have turned out to have the most practical value were coincidentally the two that I found most difficult: Typing and Physical Education. Now I can type, like I’m doing now. In Phys Ed I learned the core lesson, which is that it doesn’t hurt as much as you might have thought to get sweaty and out of breath for half an hour every day, and it does you a lot of good.
Uh, sorry about the calculus thing. I got a little careless there.
Just because you didn’t see them whip out a plan doesn’t mean they weren’t working to ones that years of experience has taught them without the need to constantly look at them. That’s not to say a good bit of math wasn’t involved. But as pointed out, there are plenty of well paying jobs that don’t require even that level/type of math.
I’ll say it again: Don’t get me wrong, those are important skills that are needed for some jobs, just not skills that are important to everyone’s life and job prospects. Most people can do quite well in life without ever learning anything about trig.
@Ian Yeah, typing would have been a useful subject to take back in the day. I never took it. Back when I was in school it wasn’t a mandatory subject and the jobs it was considered useful for weren’t ones I was considering as a future career (this was just before computers “revolutionized” business). I learned typing by doing (which makes for a handy excuse for any typos I make 🙂 ). I’m quite decent at it now, I can type at speed, making full use of both hands without the need to look at the keyboard – but it took years of experience to get that skilled at it.
That “exercise in tedium” used to be called “getting a liberal arts education.” The plays of Shakespeare, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Epic of Beowulf, Greek and Roman mythology, all those used to be the common works of a Western education. Remember the Star Trek Next Generation episode where the alien spoke in metaphors? The translator could handle the words, but the connection made no sense since there was no shared background. It’d be like saying “As Achilles in his tent,” to you, and you’d be like “????”
Losing that shared literary tradition was another lurch downward in the fall of Western Civilization. The telling point is that rather than just adding new works to the collection, the “dead white Europeans” had to be evicted and the “diverse” works took their place.
The same thing happened with feminism when, rather than adding all the new roles women should aspire to to the traditional roles, the traditional roles had to be shamed and cast out. According to them, why should any modern woman WANT to be a homemaker and mother?
Hello James Schrumpt. The problem with so many classics of literature is that they are boring and difficult to read. I consider that a bit of drawback in judging the value of a piece of art. I mean really, is The Iliad such a great work that modern people can learn something of value from reading it? It’s just a long poem, written long ago.
Why should anyone have to speak in metaphors? I notice that you quote an episode from Star Trek, so you’re drawing on an assumption of shared cultural knowledge. That’s fine. Why does that shared cultural knowledge have to include works by Ancient Greeks, or even nineteenth century Englishmen?
Every tried to read Moby Dick? It’s kind of a slog. How about Ulysses? Unreadable for most people. People who studied these works in university gained nothing but membership in an esoteric club.
Why don’t we force young people to read James Bond novels? Why don’t we make them watch the original Star Trek? Shakespeare was just a guy who wrote a string of successful plays. Does his writing really have any more value than the work of a good screenwriter of popular movies, just because it was written in the Sixteenth Century? It’s hard to make that case.
It used to be that English schoolboys were made to learn Latin and Greek. Well, why exactly? It was just a hazing ritual. Once the fashion of learning Latin and Greek ended, did England lapse into cultural decay? No.
I don’t know about Greek, but learning Latin has it’s uses in helping to understand the nuances of the English language. Many of our words have Latin roots (and this is particularly true of words in certain areas of study). Not that the majority of students need that level of understanding, just that it’s not as useless as you might think. Like Trig, it’s useful to some, but not to all.
Hello John Endicott. I actually took Grade 10 Latin in high school, which was a fine exercise in memorizing (declentsons and conjugations), but about as useful as learning to balance a broomstick on my nose.
When you’re a clever child, school is arranged to enhance your sense of your superiority at the expense of other children. And a lot of them take a terrible beating. I remember kids weeping in Arithmetic class because they couldn’t figure out how to add fractions with different denominators, and I also remember having contempt for them, as I could learn to add fractions. It was a long time before I figured out how cruel and wrong that was.
Your contempt and feelings of superiority says more about you than it does about schools.
Shaka, When the Walls Fell.
“Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” is not more nonsensical than “mathematics without intersectional feminism is white supremacy.”
I’m a math guy, and this really bugs me. This stupidity on steroids is eclipsed only by the fecklessness of the MAA’s leadership. Who evidently care more about being “woke” or popular than mathematics. Traitors? Please don’t write off math professors too soon. Hopefully the membership will rise up and throw the leadership out by their ears.
Asians are the best mathematicians, and no, that is not racist.
Here I thought that Indians and Russians seemed to have an innate talent for mathematics! It seems to have been bred out of the Greeks.
Come on guys, the Ancient Egyptians were good enough at Maths to build pyramids, use star alignments and work predictive arithmetic to marry Nile flood heights and whether there would be famine or food gluts. And they didn’t use a form of numbers most people would even recognise.
The Ancient Egyptians? well I’m not saying it was aliens… but it was aliens. Aliens, apparently, are very good at advanced Maths. /sarc for the humor impaired.
Per the Smithsonian the scientific method is inherently racist.
The Mathematical Society is being pro-active lest they be called out.
They want to be on the left side of this issue. Any absolute is now antithetical to being “woke” 2+2 may or may not equal 4. We reward “good” guesses and oh by the way, one of those 2’s may self identify as a 3. I guess that is where quantum theory come in, it is confusing to me.
Ironically- or very much apropos- the very next page on their site that I’m linked to is “Proving Unprovability” 😀
Since “mathematics” is racist….
anyone who is not in the “race” of mathematicians, who uses mathematics, ..
…. is guilty of racial appropriation.
How dare they !!
Was this article rejected by the Onion or the Bee?
Critical Theory? Frankfrut School of Marxism.
This is another attempt to create division in society, to identify racists where there arent any,. It is how Marxism gains power, it looks for an issue it can claim the moral high ground on, and with a crow bar, widens that issue into a gulf. Creating dissent, violence, and hatred, it then takes power as an ’emergency’ procedure.
Lenin used class, today it is race, identity, and the environment that are the tools of Marxism.
+100!
From the article: “Yet policies at the federal level have not consistently reflected these facts; for example, choosing not to incorporate a mask-mandate in the US has had serious consequences.”
The president cannot legally require everyone to wear a mask, unless he declares martial law and suspends the U.S. Constitution.
You would think a bunch of smart mathematicians would know this.
From the article: “As Michael Dorff and Michael Pearson stated in a recent Math Values blog, “We encourage MAA members, regardless of political persuasion, to speak out for the value of science and mathematics, and hold our leaders accountable to make use of the best possible scientific evidence in policy decisions.”
That’s all well and good. Now we have to figure out what the best possible scientific evidence really is.
Tom,
Not only that, but real leaders have to get input from all the relevant experts and weigh all the evidence before making policy decisions. In the case of a viral pandemic, an infectious disease expert will tell them that the best way to protect the population is to order everyone to isolate themselves from everyone else until a vaccine is developed. Even if accept that conclusion, you still must consult other experts to determine what the side effects of this action might be: economists to address the loss of jobs and business closings, mental health experts to access the effects of such isolation on individuals, other medical experts on the dangers of people skipping regular checkups and screenings, etc. Only then can a “leader” make a balanced decision that promotes the well-being of the greatest number of people. The “follow the science” crowd (who mostly don’t even know what science is) don’t seem to understand (or intentionally misconstrue) this part.
Critical race theory is *NOT* based on decades of scholarship. CRT is an offshot of Critical Theory useful only to those wishing to see the destruction of Western Civilization.
Critical Theory is Marxism dressed up in fancy clothes. CRT is Marxism dressed up in even fancier clothes. It truly is just that simple.
It’s a crying shame that so-called mathematicians can’t figure that out!
CRT *is* racist. And it is not a theory, it is indoctrination. CRT is antithetical to rational thinking.
It is a poison.
Those infected with and especially those spreading the infection need to be recognized.
+100!
From the article: “At the first presidential debate this year, President Trump’s refusal to disavow white nationalism and his encouragement of groups that the FBI has identified as the greatest threats of domestic terrorism, only serves to reinforce the sense that his administration seeks to reverse decades of progress on civil rights for all citizens.”
Well, if this is an example of their critical thinking then they have demonstrated their ignorance and gullibility.
President Trump has denounced nazis, white supremacists and any and all other extremists on numerous occasions and he specifically did the same thing during the last debate. It was a little hard to hear because Trump kept getting interrupted, but it’s there. And it is certainly there in numerous other statements he has made on the subject. The Democrats, and apparetly these mathematicians, want to ignore what Trump said and continue to claim he is a racist. It doesn’t matter what Trump says, the Democrats are going to call him a racist. It’s part of their formula. Every Republican or conservative is a racist to them, and the Republican president is the biggest racist. It’s standard operating procedure for Democrats. It’s their fallback position.
That these mathematicians didn’t hear Trump denouncing extremists just shows their political bias. They heard what they wanted to hear, not what was said. What does that say about their scientific abilities? It would cause me to be suspect of their analytical abilities.
From the article: “A September 4th Executive Memorandum to all Executive Departments and Agencies states that “all agencies are directed to begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on “critical race theory,” “white privilege,” or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.”
A perfectly reasonable request.
There is no systemic racism in the United States and white people are not inherently racist. That is what the “critical race theory” teaches and Trump wants to put a stop to this leftwing propaganda and race baiting and I support him in this.
There is racism in the United States and in every other nation on Earth, but the racism in the U.S. is individual racism, it is not built into the system just because white people are the majority, as “critical race theory” implies.
Most of the people out demonstrating against racism after George Floyd’s death were white people.