(no subject)
I came across a wonderfully subversive article on our K-12 math curriculum that unfortunately has yet to be published but has been circulating around the mathematics community for a couple years. Its written by Paul Lockhart, a fellow who learned math on his own terms and managed to somehow educate himself rather than rely on the "training" available to him in school. He then dropped out of college in his Freshman year to devote himself to mathematics while supporting himself as an elementary school teacher and computer programmer. Eventually he started working with Ernst Strauss at UCLA, and the two published a few papers together. Strauss introduced him to Paul Erdos,and they somehow arranged it so that he became a graduate student there. He ended up getting a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1990, and went onto be a fellow at MSRI and an assistant professor at Brown. He also taught at UC Santa Cruz. He now teaches K-12 at St. Anne's, a progressive catholic school, while continuing his research.
http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
I also kind of like how he used Simplicio and Salviato, borrowed from Galileo's Dialogue Concerning Two Chief World Systems, polemics should do it more often.
http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
I also kind of like how he used Simplicio and Salviato, borrowed from Galileo's Dialogue Concerning Two Chief World Systems, polemics should do it more often.