Conrad Wolfram - Making Maths Beautiful

Conrad Wolfram, Mathematician Founder, Wolfram Research Europe. The importance of math to jobs, society and thinking has exploded over the last few decades. Meanwhile, math education has gotten stuck or has even slipped backward. Why has this chasm opened up? It's all about computers: when they do the calculating, people can work on harder questions, try more concepts, and play with a multitude of new ideas. Conrad Wolfram discusses a new project to build a completely new math curriculum with computer-based computation at its heart - alongside a campaign to refocus math education away from historical hand-calculating techniques and toward relevant and conceptually interesting topics.

Presented at the Learning Without Frontiers Conference, January 25th 2012, London

http://www.learningwithoutfrontiers.com

• Category

  Education

[John Smith]

So are you saying that applied maths should be taught at schools? Well, applied maths is basically engineering, computer science, actuarial studies, etc. which are specialized fields and more suitable to be studied at university. If you teach applied maths to student, they won't have the skills to do the problems. I believe that maths at school should be pure maths with an emphasis on rigor, problem solving and understanding so students can make use of the maths in university.

[Joshua Klinger]

Um,.. Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, both people that were only able to ASK QUESTIONS in mathematics due to their deep understanding in maths. Thus deep understanding was only caused by learning maths. How else is someone meant to learn maths. We must be able to tackle completely theoretical problems before we are good enough to tackle real life problems

[joeboyle20]

Homosexual

[logicmanism]

I like the way you think. Some good points here.

[Ollie Elliott]

I find watching these lectures easier than Maths lessons. Honestly, without Youtube I would fail! :)

[Wouter De Wolf]

Symbolic calculators should be the norm in education. We got to use one in our last year of highschool and I can tell you I learnt a lot more maths that year than in the years before.

Starting university this year I noticed I have quite an advantage over other students.

[麗予 黃]

thank you  so inspiring

[Ben McCanna]

One thing which does not necessarily include computation or at least complex computation is mathematical proof. Something like a proof module might go well with these proposals, especially to teach the understanding of mathematical concepts.