Ask a couple of students at random what their most hated subject is, and maths will likely be one of the top answers. People seem to have powerful emotions about maths, and they are most likely to be negative rather than positive. Maths evokes an intense dread in many of us, and it is my personal opinion that this is partly because of the way our education system is built, where memorisation is encouraged over understanding. You were likely taught and required to remember Pythagoras’ theorem. But did they teach you why we need it and how we can derive it?
As a student, I thought I was going to end up as a journalist or a writer. I enjoyed literature and history greatly, but I usually ended up writing someone else’s maths assignment in my free time. Although it looked like it, I never did it purely as a favour: I enjoyed spending my time thinking about problems. In retrospect, I was extremely lucky. In any of the schools I went to, my math teachers were inspiring people. The thing about maths is that it looks very intimidating: a mesh of the letters of the Greek, Latin and Hebrew alphabets with a few other unusual symbols thrown in the mix. If you take two steps back and look at a university-level textbook, I swear it can look like gibberish. But the same also applies to all the languages you do not speak.
Yes, to me, maths is precisely that: a language. It helps us dress our knowledge of the world in a compact and highly efficient coat. Apart from involving a couple of mathematical operations, the equation that Einstein is famous for (E = mc^2) communicates to us that energy and mass are interchangeable on a basic level. That is a powerful view of the world. It is thanks to maths that physics materialises as a science, and we can describe physical phenomena.
Like anything valuable in this world, math requires hard work and practice. That is why comments such as “I am simply not good at maths” can be harmful to the development of a student. When you associate an unsuccessful attempt with your identity, it becomes a great excuse not to try anymore. It is okay not to like maths, but it is crippling when you decide that you are just not good enough for it. You are. In his book “Originals”, Adam Grant wrote that if parents want to reinforce behaviour in children, they just need to associate it with their identity. For example, “We do not take other children’s toys because we are good people.” Imagine what happens to a child when they hear from their parent that “Maths is horrifying and, yes, you just might not be that good at it.” We need more people who can communicate and explain the true essence of this beautiful subject.
The beauty of mathematics
Maths is universal. Anyone who has the background will recognise Pythagoras’ theorem, no matter where they are from and what language they speak. It is a fun fact that Pythagoras was not the first person to derive the famous formula. The theorem can be seen in the ancient Chinese text Zhoubi Suanjing dated at least 1,000 years before Pythagoras’ birth. There is evidence that the Babylonians have used it. Maths dresses insights about the world that go deeper than time and place.
Math requires hard work, but scientists can tell you about the inexplicable rush they feel when they finally solve a problem. And that emotion is not reserved just for them. Many people ask when they will ever need to use trigonometry in real life: they most likely will not, but the abstraction and logic that maths will teach you is invaluable and will stay with you for life. So will the thrill from the “Aha!” moment when you suddenly get to a solution.
Artificial Intelligence. Many of my professors were telling me that when they went to university, statistics was considered one of the dead-end disciplines of the subject. That is no longer the case. At its core, Artificial Intelligence is “the effort to automate intelligent tasks normally performed by humans.” From the 1950s to the 1980s, people were trying to achieve this task by creating a large set of explicit rules. You can guess how inefficient such a paradigm is by trying to imagine that to recommend the next best move in a chess game; one would need to write a rule for every possible next move. Statistics here comes to the rescue. Suppose we have the courses and outcomes of millions of chess games. In that case, we can notice that certain moves have a higher probability of success in a given situation even if we know nothing about the game in the first place, i.e. we can “learn” what move to opt for. This is the machine learning paradigm in programming, and it is driving one of the main technological advances in our world at the moment. Do you still think that maths is boring?
My main aim is to try to give math a better name because it deserves it. It helped and still helps us dress insights about our world that advance our technology and evolution. It transcends borders and times. By practising maths, we become better at abstraction and maths can give us great satisfaction when we reward ourselves with knowledge over memorisation. Given all of the above, how can it be the most hated subject in schools?
P.S. There are two books I highly recommend on the subject: Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife and My Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark.
