Cool Science

I have finally reached an opinion about this article in New York magazine, a list of math classes actually offered on liberal arts campuses in this country which is supposed to spin our heads a little and presumably raise some ire, or perhaps merely inspire comment from the blogosphere. At a minimum I'd go easy on this list, but ultimately I'm going further. The list is stupid.

To begin, many don't deserve to be on the list like Bard's Stats class (#9) or Hampshire's topology class (#5) which are both high quality math. They show that the authors of the list were phoning this one in. I'm willing to compromise on one perhaps: Kenyon has pulled off classic bait and switch with #6 - GOTCHA, this is actually differential equations! But there is no lapse in instruction there - it's just an attempt to try get students to overcome their fears and realize the payoffs of digesting some math.

Many others are obviously not offered by math departments but by english or maybe even philosophy. It's gratifying to realize that students across the country will find math outside of the math department and learn to see it as a bigger part of their lives. They might go on to be lawmakers, philanthropists, or any other profession to be honest, and will always think back to that class back in college where they had an epiphany about seeing math in a whole new light.

Look at Google - they hired the smartest people on the planet, went aggressively after the top math and science PhD's from MIT, Harvard, Stanford, etc. and now they've pulled off the impossible - they are the third major player in smartphones, operating systems and internet technology. They aspire to nothing less than knocking off Apple and Microsoft simultaneously and they are pursuing it with math, math and more math. Although my bias is that nobody can touch Apple as long as Jobs is running the show...

The authors end by saying these courses are why Asia is 'winning'. Wrong. These are exactly the courses that could save us by changing our national cultural attitudes about science and math. If anything, it appears the authors' inability to recognize topology, statistics or number theory, and their lack of appreciation for the broader social contexts of mathematics, are why Asia is winning.