Disaster, Circa 1965

I was reading a New Yorker article about whether our brains are wired for mathematics (apparently, yes) when I came across a reference to “new math,” followed by the apposition “now widely thought to have been an educational disaster.”

I flashed back. I was a participant in this educational disaster, in the seventh grade.

I remember learning about number systems other than our so-called base 10, like base 2. We learned about set theory, including the empty (or null) set, and Venn diagrams, which could describe the overlapping (or intersection) of sets, and functions and properties and ...

I could go on, but I sense that you are falling asleep.

So imagine having that kind of stuff rattling around in your head at age 12, with the unspoken but clear implication from the teacher that if we Americans don’t all get this and get it pronto, the Russians are going to beat us to the moon.

The Russians, as you are aware, did not beat us to the moon.

But apparently the new math played no role in our success. And as well as I can remember, it was not in the curriculum beyond that one year.

Still, parts of it continue to rattle around in my head, though much closer to the back. For instance, this is how you would express my age in base 2: 110111. Base 3? 2001. Base 4? 313. While both addition and multiplication have commutative and associative properties, subtraction and division do not. And do you know what is the set of numbers overlapping two sets of prime factors, the first for 42, the second for 79?

Ha! This is a trick question! 79 is a prime number! There is no overlap (expressed by the null set, alternately {}, or the Greek letter ∅).

I could go on. But I’m falling asleep.