“[T]here is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics…. Mathematics is the purest of the arts, as well as the most misunderstood.” -Paul Lockhart
Way back in school, I was probably classified as “good at math”. But I distinctly remember – once I got to college – loudly protesting against embarking on a math-y career. Between the ages of 18 and 21, I shifted from wanting to be a physics professor, to declaring myself an engineering major, to changing my major to philosophy. I think in large part because of the warp in focus somewhere betwixt my mostly-excellent high school math classes and then my cattle-call math and engineering classes in college, they robbed all the fun out of mathematical problem-solving. Math is, and should be, a creative process.
“Many a graduate student has come to grief when they discover, after a decade of being told they were ‘good at math,’ that in fact they have no real mathematical talent and are just very good at following directions. Math is not about following directions, it’s about making new directions.”
My older brother, J-Dog, recently sent me a great article – Lockhart’s Lament – written by Paul Lockhart and republished by Keith Devlin of Stanford. (More information about these people can be found here.) It’s a piece on mathematics education which bemoans the way its’ teaching kills creativity. This well-written article has many parallels to the arts, arts education, and creativity, so I can enthusiastically recommend it and try to re-link it for your enjoyment: