Do the Math

As children marched back into classrooms this fall, armed with sharpened pencils and snappy geometry kits, it is worth considering Anne Watson’s view of teaching mathematics: “cognitive bullying,” she calls it. Watson, Reader in Mathematics Education at Oxford University, believes that math class is too often tantamount to low-level social violence. Teachers pound in multiplication tables and triangle theorems through rote learning, beating down errant kids with blood-red Xs on the page. The modus operandi is not unlike that of a chain gang, and the brutal motivation hardly inspires productivity.

“Whack! Whack! Whack! you got that wrong!!” demonstrates Walter Whiteley, director of Applied Mathematics at York University in Toronto. “You have to wonder what the impact of that is on society.” More math phobics than prodigies, probably. And what are the implications of that?

The answer might reside implicitly in this statement: Any renaissance in modern civilization rests on you learning mathematics. I remember hearing a pronouncement to that effect, somewhere. It seemed existentially and cosmically relevant, so I wrote it down. If I were a mathematician, perhaps my brain could rouse the synapses necessary to recall the exact source. Like a weekly shot of vitamin B12, math fortifies the brain.

For a layperson, my mind is reasonably well wired, mathematically speaking. Over the past four years I’ve been a foreign correspondent in the land of geometry. My introductory guide and interpreter was Donald Coxeter, the man who kept classical geometry from extinction in the last century. I tumbled down the mathematical rabbit hole when I followed the elderly Coxeter to geometry conferences in Banff and Budapest a few years ago. Coxeter was introduced before his lectures as “the greatest living classical geometer” and still stands as Canada’s most famous mathematician. Since his death in 2003 (at age 96, and still doing his math), I’ve been writing a book about his life and the life of geometry through history, adventuring into every nook and cranny of this wonderland.

Coxeter was obsessed with the logical nonsense of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll (a.k.a. the mathematician C.L. Dodgson), and once explained to me why he loved Alice so much. “It’s like reading about a part of mathematics that you know is beautiful, but that you don’t quite understand,” he said. “Like string theory. That’s as much a mystery to me as it is anyone else who can’t make head nor tails of the eleventh dimension.” Math, for experts and amateurs alike—if you step back, tilt your head, and consider it from the right angle—has a magical and addictive quality; it’s a realm of intellectual epiphanies, the aha! or eureka! moments that demonstrate the potential of the human brain.

Nonetheless, whenever I dare mention—at a dinner party, say—that I’m spending my time researching a man who resurrected geometry from near extinction, the conversation skips a beat, or ten. Expressions fall to petrified vacuity as people entertain flashbacks of fumbling with protractors and memorizing the Pythagorean theorem. Geometry is seared in their memory as a traumatizing experience and a subject enthusiastically abandoned in adolescence. Math thereafter becomes a never-neverland-tangent of a life path that only geeks pursue, a set of ideas segregated from our consciousness and purged from our frame of reference. The conversation resumes only when one math-verboten individual breaks the silence by saying something like: “This man saved geometry?! Why on earth did he do that? He would have saved us all a lot of misery if he had let it die!”

Whiteley argues otherwise. He believes that a decline in the hands-on, visual, and geometric approaches to teaching mathematics—in the West, a trend dating back to the 1930s—has resulted in a “geometry gap.” He suggests that if students were encouraged to “see like a mathematician,” rather than simply computing numbers like one, the disease of math phobia might be cured and mathematical reasoning might become a more natural and enjoyable undertaking. Whiteley asserts that if mathematical learning were more sensible—that is, more grounded in the senses—the human experience of math would be enhanced. “The visual is central to all levels of mathematics,” he says, delivering his spiel last May to a small amphitheatre of schoolteachers, a subset of the larger gathering of nearly 2,000 educators at a mathematics education conference at York University. In the lobby there were textbooks for sale promising “Brain Boosting Math” and T-shirts that boasted: