A Mathematician's Lament, And The Tragedy Of Modern Education

Throughout my schooling life, I found myself at odds with my math teachers. I’d ask questions that were dismissed immediately as just the fancy of an overactive imagination. I was praised for my ability in proofs and also scolded for my weakness in arithmetic.

“Adithya is a very talented student; he would have done a lot better if only he practised.”

These teachers wanted nothing but the best for me. They had their hearts in the right place; it’s just that what’s expected of a student is poisoning and stifling me in ways I or they didn’t really know. There was a hidden message behind what they were saying. I was not good enough. I will not be good enough until I do what’s expected of me and do that in the best way possible.

This has plagued me throughout all my life as a student. Growing up, nothing less than absolute perfection was expected of me. A perfect score in math exams; no mistakes of silly arithmetic.

I was expected to be like the subject. Perfect and precise.

The mistakes I ended up making were never conceptual; I loved the ideas behind mathematics. The mistakes I ended up making were almost always trivial, useless errors that are bound to happen when you place a timer on someone and ask them to move numbers around for 2 hours.

A misplaced decimal point here, a wrong addition there, a scrawled-on 6 being mistook to be a 0. I was always berated for it. I berated myself for it.

Our schools give us paintbrushes but never allow us to appreciate what we are painting. It’s like being sped through an art museum with your eyes closed and calling it an appreciation of the subject.

Can you blame people when they say they hate math?

Somehow, I still felt drawn to the subject. I loved learning about it; I binge-watched Numberphile videos on YouTube, which subsequently led to me picking up Alex’s Adventures in Numberland and deepening my love for the subject. It was strange to reconcile the love with my lackluster performance. I felt like a cricket fan who could never be in the stadium.

I think I would have gone my entire life believing that.

When I came to college, Mathematics was treated with respect. People floundered in the subject I was bad at, and I managed to flourish. Mathematics was given rigour and beauty that I was not used to, but it’s become my favourite subject to explore and study. It is largely due to having a professor who truly cared about the subject. Mathematics became reframed as a mess that organizes itself into logic. The illusion of perfection shattered to reveal artistry, pure and simple.

Mathematics is the music of reason. To do mathematics is to engage in an act of discovery and conjecture, intuition and inspiration; to be in a state of confusion—not because it makes no sense to you, but because you gave it meaning and you still don’t understand what your creation is up to; to have a breakthrough idea; to be frustrated as an artist; to be awed and overwhelmed by an almost painful beauty; to be alive, damn it.

The point of highlighting my relationship with mathematics as time progressed is to help highlight just how true this document is.

Mathematics is beautiful. Solving problems is an art form, and we’re losing so much talent and power by refusing to teach it the way it should be taught.