New tools for math learning 
Tuesday, January 30, 2007, 10:24 AM
I first saw Wolfram Demonstrations when it was just over a thousand pieces old. At that stage a trove of passingly interesting ideas. No longer: I now realise each of them is a tool of first water. Each can be built into a model from game up to post-doc research. Any can grab a child and give a lifetime of deep maths. For the design engineer, the artefacts list is endless. For the builder of prosthetic organs, the fluid flows mesh neatly with the metal matrix. For the knowledge builder, any maths concept can be instantly on display for reforming and adapting, and related to all the cousins at a click. For the open source enthusiast, the ability to add original stuff is empowering, arguably the greatest asset of the system as it grows both complex and adaptive, like life a rarity that reverses entropy. For the career scientist, the opportunity to model freely any aspect of science from daily minutia to broadest concept in the discipline and across disciplines offers professional insights and oversights that are rare in any working lifetime.
But the greatest use if the publicity flows right in UK is the potential to solve the three biggest social challenges and current failures of our education system: our inability to catch children’s enthusiasm for mathematics, the fear and stress most parents have for the subject from their own schooldays which they pass straight on to their children, and the total lack of remedial maths for the 100 000 school-age escapers and the bigger number of penal system victims. Only when the pleasures of mathematical thought outweigh the benefits of standard mental activity will global society be on the way to fulfilling potential. Plato would have agreed, if he hadn’t thought it first.


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