A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form

by Paul Lockhart, Keith Devlin (Foreword by)

Overview

“One of the best critiques of current K-12 mathematics education I have ever seen, written by a first-class research mathematician who elected to devote his teaching career to K-12 education.” —Keith Devlin, NPR’s “Math Guy”

A brilliant research mathematician reveals math to be a creative art form on par with painting, poetry, and sculpture, and rejects the standard anxiety-producing teaching methods used in most schools today. Witty and accessible, Paul Lockhart’s controversial approach will provoke spirited debate among educators and parents alike, altering the way we think about math forever.

Paul Lockhart is the author of Arithmetic, Measurement, and A Mathematician’s Lament. He has taught mathematics at Brown University, University of California, Santa Cruz, and to K-12 level students at St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn, New York.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781934137338
Publisher:	Bellevue Literary Press
Publication date:	04/01/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	926 KB

About the Author

Paul Lockhart dropped out of college after one semester to devote himself exclusively to math. Based on his own research he was admitted to Columbia University where he received his PhD. The author of Arithmetic, Measurement, and A Mathematician’s Lament, he has taught mathematics at Brown University, University of California, Santa Cruz, and to K-12 level students at St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn, New York.

Editorial Reviews

Like music or painting, says long-time math teacher (K-12 and college) Lockhart, mathematics is an art-"the art of explanation," "the music of reason"-and its method of instruction in American schools has reduced a "rich and fascinating adventure of the imagination... to a sterile set of facts to be memorized and procedures to be followed." With passionate reasoning, Lockhart unveils the creative, flexible, open-minded side of math; an early analogy casting music education in a math instruction model-students must study proper notation for years before attempting to, say, hum a tune-makes a brilliant introduction. Making a clear distinction between "facts and formulas" and "mathematics," Lockhart inspires a second look at received wisdom regarding math-that it's necessary to learn (do carpenters use trigonometry? Does anyone balance their checkbook without a calculator?), or that it has any direct connection to reality ("the glory of it is its complete irrelevance to our lives"). Though it features a thorough thrashing of current methods without suggesting how to fix the curriculum, Lockhart's slim volume (based on his widely-circulated essay) provides a fresh way of thinking about math, and education in general, that should inspire practical applications in the classroom and at home.
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Publishers Weekly

One of the best critiques of current K-12 mathematics education I have ever seen, written by a first-class research mathematician who elected to devote his teaching career to K-12 education.” —Keith Devlin, NPR’s “Math Guy”

“Gorgeous. . . . Lockhart is passionate, contagiously so.” —Los Angeles Times

“Searing and pointed. . . . An easy, thoughtful, and entertaining read. . . . [Lockhart’s] passion makes the critique compelling.” —Notices of the American Mathematical Society

“Provides a fresh way of thinking about math, and education in general, that should inspire practical applications in the classroom and at home.” —Publishers Weekly

“A Mathematician’s Lament is a fascinating argument that anyone interested in mathematics education should read. I promise that they will enjoy the experience, whether they agree with all that Lockhart writes or not.” —Bryan Bunch, author of The Kingdom of Infinite Number: A Field Guide

“This brief and elegant celebration of mathematics is a charming rant against the way you and I learned the subject. Is painting just coloring in numbered regions? Is the sunset just a list of wavelengths and a compass setting? No more, Lockhart argues, than mathematics is just definitions and formulas. To put back play and joy in our mathematics classrooms, he shows, all we need do is restore the real mathematics.” —Robert P. Crease, author of The Great Equations: Breakthroughs in Science from Pythagoras to Heisenberg

“Lockhart has written an important, and eloquent, lamentation and exultation: he laments about the state of math education today, but exults in the hope that teachers might be inspired to invite students to experience mathematics as the exciting ‘poetry of ideas’ that it truly is.” —Barry Mazur, Gerhard Gade UniversityProfessor, Harvard Universityand author of Imagining Numbers (particularly the square root of minus fifteen)

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