12 Jul 2005 - 00:26

or, why mathematicians can't save us from bad math ed

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.

Lest 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, 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.

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I am at something of a loss as to why the Notices is so open to the rantings of the education folk.

As a former academic pure mathematician, I think I can answer that. There's a form of "liberal guilt" occurring within the pure mathematical community. Some of them, not all, feel guilty about being paid very good money to be doing something that comes to them very easily and which has, for all practical purposes, no earthly use. Many of them are Children of the Sixties whose theology requires them to have a social consciousness; yet their lives are in essence devoted to the least "socially responsible" profession imaginable. So a politically obfuscating fog is thrown over everything and the pretense is made that people who just teach are just as important to mathematics as those who do research and that those who just do research are just as important to the community as those who teach. Plus, it presumably helps to suck dollars out of Washington to pretend that there is a large mass of "mathematicians" who are all in agreement. In reality, the number of pure mathematicians who are doing really important work is probably less than 200: scarcely a constituency from the DC perspective.

-- WichitaBoy - 12 Jul 2005

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This is truly weird! Talk about stereotyping! First "good money": for the education level, not so good. "doing something that comes to them very easily" : Oops, I missed something here in my education. If it comes so easily, why to the good researchers work so hard? Utter nonsense; presumably part of the stereotype, but false. "No earthly use"? Every bit of math used today by engineers, physicists, chemists, biologists, etc, was once not known. The process of making it known is called mathematics research, so unless every bit of math in use today has no earthly use, math research has its place. "Children of the Sixties" gasp, gag me with a spoon. I was there and can't even remember them. "the least 'socially responsible' profession imaginable" Wow! I would have thought there was more competition for that spot. We educate college students in math and we create the math necessary for tomorrow's world, and there is nothing worse than that? Since there are probably fewer than 20 people in the entire USA who "just do research" the "obfuscating fog" has overtaken me on this point. The amount of money "sucked" out of Washington for mathematics is so small it doesn't show up on graphs of overall research dollars. It still doesn't show up after you delete biology, medical, and really big science research. I fail to see anything "helping". I think this really goes under the heading of the politically incompetent mathematician again. I suspect that there is no field of anything that has more than 200 people "doing really important work". However, those 200 people cannot do "really important work" in any field without all the others there to support them and build on their work. Also, it is very very difficult to figure out, in advance, just which of the 200 are going to do the "really important work". Duh, let's only support the guy who is going to invent the laser, or the X-ray, or the MRI, or the ... Well, at any rate, I see that stereotyping is alive and well; not to mention wrong.

-- KtmGuest - 12 Jul 2005

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Well...I have no idea what the politics and ideology of mathematics departments are.

I've gathered from conversations with mathematicians that there has been a move like what my husband has seen in political science departments (and like what has apparently developed in economics departments), which is an almost formal rejection of 'practical' or 'applied' work--including pure research that might one day have a practical application.

I was a trustee at NAAR (National Alliance for Autism Research) for 7 years. During that time I was the science writer as well.

I once interviewed a researcher whose work we were funding.

I asked how her work might contribute to treating or curing autism.

She answered, rather starchly, that it wouldn't.

She was doing pure research. (I don't think she used the word 'pure,' but that was the implication.)

This was an amazing moment for me, because:

• we were funding her work; she was speaking to a trustee of the organization that voted funds for her, and I was one of the people who voted!
  
  It should have been obvious that I wasn't devoting 24 hours a day, & decimating my own career, to fund pure research on autism.
  
  If a person wants to do pure research on autism, great. But I can't abandon my own career and income in order to support it. If we don't find treatments and/or a cure in my lifetime I will have two very handicapped children to support after I die. My obligations are clear.

• This was a wonderful woman, who, IIRC, had a clinical practice herself, was devoted to autistic children & committed to their treatment--and yet she was slightly offended when I suggested that the research part of her life might have a practical application.

I've spent enough time in & around academia myself that I think my interpretation was correct.

She was a dedicated & talented clinician, yes.

But she was also a high-profile researcher, and in high-profile research circles 'applied' is lower status than 'pure.'

This appears to be true in virtually every discipline.

In film studies, 'film theory' was radically higher status than 'film history'!

(I gather that may have changed. Let's hope so.)

-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Jul 2005

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I've gathered from conversations with mathematicians that there has been a move like what my husband has seen in political science departments (and like what has apparently developed in economics departments), which is an almost formal rejection of 'practical' or 'applied' work--including pure research that might one day have a practical application.

This is undeniably so. Although it is hard to tell what pure work might have an application in the future. This is really what the original Mathematician's Apology is all about.

I found the absolute inapplicability of the mathematics I was doing extremely deflating. A big part of the reason I left academics was that I was finding it difficult to pursue my increasingly applied interests in the place and situation in which I found myself.

-- CarolynJohnston - 12 Jul 2005