Math is the Best Way to Make Sense of the World
When Rebecca Goldin spoke to a recent class of incoming freshmen at George Mason University, she relayed a disheartening statistic: According to a recent study, 36 percent of college students don’t significantly improve in critical thinking during their four-year tenure. “These students had trouble distinguishing fact from opinion, and cause from correlation,” Goldin explained. She went on to offer some advice: “Take more math and science than is required. And take it seriously.” Why? Because “I can think of no better tool than quantitative thinking to process the information that is thrown at me.” Take, for example, the study she had cited. A first glance, it might seem to suggest that a third of college graduates are lazy or ignorant, or that higher education is a waste. But if you look closer, Goldin told her bright-eyed audience, you’ll find a different message: “Turns out, this third of students isn’t taking any science.”
Where does your passion for mathematics and quantitative thought come from?
As a young person I never thought I liked math. I absolutely loved number sequences and other curious things that, in retrospect, were very mathematical. At the dinner table, my dad, who is a physicist, would pull out some weird puzzle or riddle that sometimes only took a minute to solve, and other times I’d be like, “Huh, I have no idea how that one works!” But there was an overall framework of joy around solving it.
Read the full article in Wired here