That narrow, rigid version of mathematics where there's only one right approach is what most students experience, and it's a big part of why people have such math trauma. It keeps them from realizing the full range and power of mathematics. When you only have students blindly memorizing math facts, they're not developing number sense.
Professors say they really want their students to be able to analyze data, create charts and spreadsheets and reason mathematically – skills that high school math courses often skip or rush through. “Teachers are so focused on covering all the topics that they don’t have time to do the practices when the practices are what really matters,”
Gates says math education hasn't kept up with how the world has evolved. In his post, Gates said math skills were a "powerful indicator" of future success...
...nature is a wonderful realm in which to observe beauty born out of mathematical relationships. The natural world provides seemingly endless patterns underpinned by numbers – if we can recognize them.
Number theory finds unexpected applications in science and engineering, from leaf angles that (almost) universally follow the Fibonacci sequence, to modern encryption techniques based on factoring prime numbers.
Many popular books on mathematics try to be approachable by talking about stock markets or poker odds.Others wax poetic about prime numbers and the mystery of infinity. Cheng’s books lift readers to the rarefied heights of mathematical abstraction by teaching them category theory, which she believes is the most foundational kind of math.
pace exploration requires tremendous precision. Mathematicians have invented ingenious ways to transmit and store information. One surprisingly effective method uses Reed-Solomon codes, which are built on the same basic algebra that students learn in school.
Szemerédi proved that any set comprising a positive fraction of the integers must contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. The result was a landmark in the subfield of mathematics called additive combinatorics.
