I should explain first that "A Mathematician's Apology" is an in-joke -- it's the title of the memoirs of G.H Hardy, a mathematician who was at Cambridge in the last century, and who for a time was (according to himself) the "fifth best pure mathematician in the world". His Apology in the title is for the absolute inapplicability of the highest level of pure mathematics to real life problems.

The current Apology (by an anonymous pure mathematician) is not so much an apology as an explanation of why we really can't look to pure mathematicians as a whole for effective help in the political games surrounding the Math Wars. He's right; mowing over your average pure mathematician, politically, is like shooting fish in a barrel. In addition, the realities of the mathematics research and research funding game are exactly as he describes them; they do not reward political savvy at all; quite the contrary.

Let I sound too jaded, this is a good time to recognize the efforts of those many pure mathematicians who have involved themselves in the effort to improve mathematics education at the K-12 level. David Klein, Ralph Raimi, Bas Braams, James Milgram, Hung-Hsi Wu, Fred Greenleaf (hi Fred!), and many others have spent lots of perfectly good political capital fighting the good fight. As David says, thank goodness for tenure.

A bit of background: the AMS is the American Mathematical Society, the main professional society for research (pure) mathematicians. The MAA is the Mathematical Association of America, which as a group focuses on college-level mathematics education. The Notices are the newsletter of the AMS.
-- CarolynJohnston

Mathematicians are a diverse group of human beings and don't deserve to be stereotyped anymore than any other stereotyped groups deserve. However, society has already done a good job stereotyping mathematicians. There is usually a grain of truth in stereotypes and the mathematician stereotype might well be more accurate than most.

As a group, politics is not our strong point. I doubt that we have the normal spectrum of political smarts within our ranks but the whole spectrum has probably slid down to one side quite a bit.

There is not much in our daily work lives that develops political skills. Better an engineer or physicist who is used to politicking for zillion dollar grants and who cannot do their work without these grants. In math, if you lose your grants you can still plod along and get your work done.

It is worse than that. If a mathematician goes to Washington and raises a hundred million dollars for math in general, their chair won't give them a raise because they didn't do anything. If a physicist or a biologist does that, their lab is cranking out papers with their name on them all the time while they are in Washington.

Our "opposition" in mathematics education works in an environment where political skills are necessary to advance. They are a tough bunch.

A math Ph.D. in academia has two fundamental jobs after helping the institution run itself. One is to do research and one is to teach. Only a handful of academic mathematicians avoid teaching and only do research. On the other hand, probably the majority, far and away, are not doing research but only teaching. If all you do is teach mathematics, then it might be reasonable to be labeled a math educator as opposed to a "mathematician."

The MAA is not really a research mathematician organization. The AMS is a research organization and those in the AMS who gravitate towards the education committee are not your normal mathematicians (by definition).

I am at something of a loss as to why the Notices is so open to the rantings of the education folk. Perhaps it is Andy's way of trying to get mathematicians moving. I don't know.

-- CarolynJohnston - 12 Jul 2005

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