Monday Meanderings

4-ingredient potpourri today...:

1) As a follow-up to Friday's post here's an interesting and more general recent article on the "Fields Medal" for mathematics (includes a couple of audio-casts):

http://tinyurl.com/m7m25uc

2) This week's NY Times "Wordplay" column again focuses on Martin Gardner, and again includes a quotation that's too wonderful not to pass along. This is from Gardner's editor, Robert Weil:

"Martin just didn’t care about money. I think you find with some overly creative people they can be overly generous. They undervalue their own work. Sometimes creative people have agents to counterbalance this tendency but Martin didn’t believe in agents.
"Martin was an Oklahoma boy who happened to be a genius. He was the opposite of pretentious. He was something out of the Wizard of Oz. To know Martin — he was something out of a time warp. He lived in his stories. He lived in Lewis Carroll. He was frozen in the land of Oz. Part of him is Dorothy just skipping." 

I love that imagery, Martin Gardner as "Dorothy just skipping." The whole puzzle column is here:
http://wordplay.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/gardner-4/?_r=0

3) Yet another very interesting interview with Edward Frenkel, the current mathematician du jour! ;-) (and author of "Love and Math"):

http://www.timesofisrael.com/?p=691188

4) Finally, on the education front, West Coast Khan Academy and East Coast Phillips Academy (a premier New England prep school) are planning to collaborate on a first-year calculus course, hopefully to be ready before end of 2014. "The goal for the offering is to provide a personalized and adaptive instructional program for students":

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2013/10/the_khan_academy_is_expanding.html

Khan & Its Critics

Important (and long) post from Keith Devlin on the skirmishes between Khan Academy and its critics here (includes many good links as well):

http://devlinsangle.blogspot.com/2012/07/cant-we-all-get-along.html

...should be read by everyone interested in math education (...but then that probably goes for everything Keith writes!)

excerpt:

"Learning mathematics is hard. Very hard. It is easy to get discouraged and give up. Some of us, when we are learning math the first time, are lucky enough to have a parent, grandparent, uncle or aunt, older sibling, or family friend who can sit down alongside us and help us. I suspect that a great many of today’s professional mathematicians owe their eventual success in the subject to someone who mentored them in the early days.

"But not everyone has such a person in their lives. At least, they did not until Sal Khan came along: friendly, non-threatening, patient, and a good explainer (actually not brilliant, but that might be all to the good, since a brilliant instructor could easily discourage a less-brilliant student). Above all, human. A regular guy. Just think about that for a moment. It’s a valuable weapon in the educational landscape....

"...Then Bill Gates comes along, and KA goes global. Expectations change. Now things have gotten more tricky. When a resource like KA becomes the primary vehicle by which millions of people acquire many or all of their mathematical skills, the stakes become dramatically higher than when it was a one-man homework-help service. Like it or not, ask for it or not, KA now has (in my view) an obligation to get things right. Doing so without destroying a major part of its appeal, is clearly going to be tricky."

Khan Academy on 60 Minutes

I'd been thinking of writing a post about the (I think overblown) controversy over Khan Academy for awhile... but for now will just let it go with this "60 Minutes" report from yesterday:

Vi and Sal Together

Vi Hart and Sal Khan (Khan Academy) discussing human perception of logarithmic scales:

More on Khan Academy

The Washington Post highlights Salmon Khan and his Khan Academy here:

http://tinyurl.com/45xww75

Khan's work has come under fire in some circles of late, but I too am a big fan of his approach, while granting that it will require tweaking and refinement to meet the hype it's sometimes given. Let's put it this way: our traditional, decades-old methodologies for math instruction haven't exactly set a very high bar to be surpassed, and digital approaches like Khan's are almost certainly the wave of the future...