Kill Math

Math continues to become more important in describing our world. As Richard Feynman said about people looking for the right book to explain principles of physics, "This one is pretty good. Maybe if I got that one, I will understand." Well, he says you just can't. Mathematics is the language of the universe.

But most of us are not expert mathematicians. Even Einstein, though incredibly intuitive, recognized he needed help with mathematics and sought young, talented colleagues who could help him with the math. As Katie and Sean know, we grasp mathematical symbols and concepts with varying speed and ability.

Bret Victor is a former Apple designer who left since he has "zero interest in helping people look through photos and listen to music." He is interested in designing a better UI for mathematics.

Have you ever tried multiplying roman numerals? It’s incredibly, ridiculously difficult. That’s why, before the 14th century, everyone thought that multiplication was an incredibly difficult concept, and only for the mathematical elite. Then arabic numerals came along, with their nice place values, and we discovered that even seven-year-olds can handle multiplication just fine. There was nothing difficult about the concept of multiplication -- the problem was that numbers, at the time, had a bad user interface.

He is interested in math reform. His project is called Kill Math. He is NOT interested in math educational reform.

If I had to guess why "math reform" is misinterpreted as "math education reform", I would speculate that school is the only contact that most people have had with math. Like school-physics or school-chemistry, math is seen as a subject that is taught, not a tool that is used. People don't actually use math-beyond-arithmetic in their lives, just like they don't use the inverse-square law or the periodic table.

Which is the premise of this project, of course -- people don't use math. But everyone seems to believe, if only math were taught better, they would use it! And my position (and the entire point of the project) is: No. Teach the current mathematical notation and methods any way you want -- they will still be unusable. They are unusable in the same way that any bad user interface is unusable -- they don't show the user what he needs to see, they don't match how the user wants to think, they don't show the user what actions he can take.

Interactive Exploration of a Dynamical System from Bret Victor.