All The Mathematical Methods I Learned In My University Math Degree Became Obsolete In My Lifetime
If you are connected with the world of K-12 mathematics education, it’s highly unlikely that a day will go by without you uttering, writing, hearing, or reading the term “number sense”. In contrast everyone else on the planet would be hard pressed to describe what it is. Though entering the term into Google will return close to 38 million hits, it has yet to enter the world’s collective consciousness. Stanford mathematician Keith Devlin explains what it is.
When I graduated with a bachelors degree in mathematics from one of the most prestigious university mathematics programs in the world (Kings College London) in 1968, I had acquired a set of skills that guaranteed full employment, wherever I chose to go, for the then-foreseeable future—a state of affairs that had been in existence ever since modern mathematics began some three thousand years earlier. By the turn of the new Millennium, however, just over thirty years later, those skills were essentially worthless, having been very effectively outsourced to machines that did it faster and more reliably, and were made widely available with the onset of first desktop- and then cloud-computing. In a single lifetime, I experienced first-hand a dramatic change in the nature of mathematics and how it played a role in society.
