A Mathematician’s Lament (2002) [pdf]

This is how people think of Math class: "Music class is where we take out our staff paper, our teacher puts some notes on the board, and we copy them or transpose them into a different key. We have to make sure to get the clefs and key signatures right, and our teacher is very picky about making sure we fill in our quarter-notes completely. One time we had a chromatic scale problem and I did it right, but the…

Oddly enough, I went to high school with Paul Lockhart and I too became fascinated with math despite rather than because of our terrible high school math program. I think what originally got interested in math was the infamous "new math" program [1] that existed in the 60s. And the thing with New Math is that was abolished through a backlash of parent and teachers because ... the parents and teachers couldn't understand the new concepts. And this is the…

As someone who majored in math in college, this essay did an excellent job of communicating ideas that I've struggled to explain to family and friends who practically flinch when I tell them I studied math. If you connected with this essay (or, perhaps, if you did not), I highly recommend checking out a book called 99 Variations on a Proof, by Philip Ording. It is an enjoyable, easy to understand journey through the art of making a mathematical argument…

This is an article that everyone interested in education - mathematics and otherwise - should read, takes notes in, and then think critically about what they do, and what they're trying to accomplish. It has its weak points, in places it might be wrong, but it should be read in full, with care. To the submitter: In case you're confused as to why your submission isn't getting more attention, it has been submitted before. Here are the summarised results from…