“A Mathematician’s Lament” by Paul Lockhart is a fantastic short read up next for #bookstr
This was a spontaneous read after I watched some videos about Newton and Fermat and Euler and wondered, where did the brilliant minds go.
In using a lot of AI this year I’ve frequently been thinking on path dependence. That’s a huge topic for another post but I wanted to know how these great minds were educated back then that Leibniz and Newton could independently discover Calculus.
Any way, just something I’d never really thought much of, but mathematics was basically a hobby for most of these guys. Like you play Wordle or watch football, these guys would sit down after a long day at The Mint or as a Judge or whatever and discover new maths and physics. There was no path dependence for them back then.
Lockhart makes major criticism of mathematics as it’s taught today in rigid, rules-based, notation heavy gobbledygook without context, without meaning, and removed from actual problems to be solved.
His lament is that Maths is an art, which is meant to be fun, meant to be play, but the way it has been systematised and formalised and made mandatory learning of rules and formulas and shorthand without context, taught by the most uninspiring box-checking teachers who never explore maths for fun, has completely ruined the field. Sapping all joy out of it, the mental games we can play with it, the learning for the sake of learning, and the wonder in patterns of a realm beyond us.
Lockhart has some very basic solutions which will never reach standardised education but I really appreciated this short book regardless.
I excelled at maths as a kid competing at national level but by the time I got to High School and had a math-heavy schedule for my Uni path, I fucking hated it and nearly failed one of my two graduating math classes.
Lockhart’s lament resonated with me because I can still remember those early years where I did it for fun, and then I recalled that High School experience which was exactly as he described.
It’s inspired me to study Euclid’s Elements next year and see if I can rediscover some of the joy of mathematics for myself.
Highly recommend anyone with kids give this a read. It’s only 2 hours, very approachable, and it might save them from having the joy sapped out of maths as happened to me and I’m sure many others.
