by Luke Wolcott

I recently finished teaching a summer program for advanced middle-schoolers; my job was to expose them to math they wouldn’t normally encounter in school.  Content-wise, this meant things like group theory, diophantine equations, egyptian fractions, elementary number theory, etc.  But I also took this as an opportunity to expose them to a mathematical lifestyle.  We explored, we followed our curiosity, we researched.

My students loved to hear about the history behind the math – especially the personal stories.  The stories that a community carries are instrumental in defining and transmitting the values and norms of that community.  Sure, some of them are apocryphal, some are most certainly false.  But I couldn’t resist.  I told the legends of Ramanujan, Galois, Cantor, Descartes, Erdos, Noether, etc., enthusiastically blending facts and myths.

While these math legends are entertaining, popular, and often inspiring, they are problematic as a basis for transmitting cultural norms, and as a framework for embedding the math community within society as a whole.  Reuben Hersh and Vera John-Steiner, in “Loving and Hating Mathematics,” directly address these issues, and, through a substantial amount of biographical data, fill in the gap between math legend and math reality.

Continue reading →