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We Need to Know Math's Limitations

In a Forbes interview with Jordan Shapiro, Keith Devlin talks about twenty-first century math and how to make it accessible to more people.

No one, least of all me, is saying we should abandon the traditional symbolic representation for mathematics. You need to master that language if you want to go on to a career in science or engineering, and many other careers as well. Most advanced mathematics is inherently symbolic, and I cannot see any current technology changing that. What I do say, based on a lot of hard evidence, is that, because of the Symbol Barrier, we should not make the symbolic representation the entry pathway into mathematics. It disenfranchises too many otherwise able people. What video game technologies can do is provide a User Interface to mathematics that much better suited to beginner-level learning. Today, study of the symbolic representation can be postponed until after the student has mastered the basic mathematical thinking in a more efficient way.

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Start Date: 
Monday, August 11, 2014