"Has the math brand become toxic? That was the provocative question posed by Conrad Wolfram in a blog post earlier this summer. “Sadly,” he wrote, “I’ve started to conclude that the answer is yes.”
That conclusion may seem startling, especially as Wolfram is the strategic director of Wolfram Research, and one of the brainchild behind Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica, a system widely used in technical fields to process complex computations and calculations. His critique, in a nutshell: math instruction has become too fixated on computation—solving for x, for example—and removed from real-world applications and data.
Today, Wolfram is the founder of Computers-Based Math, an effort that he described as “building a new math curriculum that assumes computers exist.” In the following interview with EdSurge, he explains what exactly that means. (Note: the interview has been edited for clarity.)"