Reflections on the book A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart

Because I am an IT professional, many people assume I must love math.  While I did OK at math in school, I never really enjoyed it.  A Mathematician’s Lament goes a long way to explaining why.

In contrast, I remember vividly my first contact with computers.  I was in grade 5.  I had Mr. B. (one of those cool male teachers who went by his initial only).  The computer was an Apple II E.  The code he showed us was simple:

10 PRINT “HELLO”
20 GOTO 10

Of course, this meant the computer would print HELLO forever, or at least until you hit the ESC key.  I was immediately stuck by the infinite potential of a machine that did exactly whatever you said.  I would go on to spend years tinkering with code, writing home-made computer games and otherwise experimenting with these great machines (one silly experiment involved seeing how much abuse a 5 1/4″ disk could take before becoming completely unreadable – surprisingly, it could take a lot!)  I went on further to win multiple awards as a top computer student and yet never really pictured myself working with them, doing a business degree instead.  Computers were for fun!

photo credit: tachyondecay

Math, on the other hand, was pure drudgery.  The timed multiplication table quizes in elementary school were the worst – to this day I freeze up on any short timed event (I am unable to play Scategories with the timer).  Throughout my mathematical education, I often thought “if only I could get a computer to do all this!”  Mathematical proofs in high school were no better – I took them as exercises in irrelevance that simply had to be memorized.  My success in high school math came only from monotonous repetition of exercises.  I took out my frustrations in math with a doodled character I named “Math Man” who had gone insane because of math, loosely based on Bloom County’s Bill the Cat.

Once in second-year university, an economics professor realized that most of us had no clue about calculus (even after finishing 2 courses on it) so he took the time to give us an economist’s eye view of calculus, and for the first time calculus actually made sense.  Sadly, moments of inspired understanding such as this were few and far between.

What Lockhart tells us is that the way math is taught in schools is wrong.  It kills creativity, innovation and true understanding.  I agree completely.  Lockhart argues that if music were taught in the same way, students would spend years transposing written music from one key to another but never hear a song.  He argues that high school math proofs are written in jargon and incomprehensible, even to most mathematicians.  For a truly successful mathematical education, it needs to be experimentational and even fun.  Math education should involve play and discovery, puzzles and games, and moments of eureka!

In a sense, my education in computers and mathematics gave me very opposite experiences.  One was fun, free-spirited adventure; the other boring, formalized and sterile.  Lockhart tells us it doesn’t have to be this way.  I highly recommend his book to anyone who felt that his or her mathematical education was a waste of time.