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Here's the full list comparing math, reading, and science scores by country: https://www.oecd.org/pisa/OECD_2022_PISA_Results_Comparing%20countries%E2%80%99%20a

Here's the full list comparing math, reading, and science scores by country: https://www.oecd.org/pisa/OECD_2022_PISA_Results_Comparing%20countries%E2%80%99%20and%20economies%E2%80%99%20performance%20in%20mathematics.pdf https://www.oecd.org/pisa/OECD_2022_PISA_Results_Comparing%2... ---- Anecdotal side story: I grew up in Asia (30 years ago) and went through primary school there before moving to the US. The country I was raised in had and has some of the highest international math scores in the world. But I always wondered why that mattered at all. Every weeknight after school, I was forced to attend something called "Kumon", which is a Japanese torture method that puts kids in dank basements for multiple hours a day, doing hundreds of rote math problems in harsh florescent light. https://www.kumon.com/how-kumon-works https://www.kumon.com/how-kumon-works I did that for several years in lieu of having any after school social life or what the West would consider a "childhood". Eventually I just couldn't take it anymore and started getting all wrong answers on purpose, then tearing out random pages, then throwing entire booklets out the window, much to my proctors' and parents' chagrin. Eventually I just refused to do any more, period, and would rip up every booklet and break every pencil they gave me. All that really taught me was to absolutely hate math and question authority. It contributed to significant depression and I dropped out of high school as a suicidal teenager. Eventually I moved to America and got a GED (high school equivalency diploma). I finished the test in a third of the time and scored the highest math scores that exam center had ever seen (they told me), ending in the national 99th percentile. I shrugged. What the US considered high school equivalent I had learned in elementary and middle school. I wasn't proud of it, far from it... it all seemed like a pointless dog and pony show. I never really used math again after that, even after 20 years of programming. Maybe some arithmetic here and there for bills and to split a Venmo dinner. That's about it. Why was there such a high focus on such a pointless yet painful skill? I know one statistician in my life, but nobody else I know uses anything past basic algebra in adult life. Most never even use arithmetic. Meanwhile, traditionally underappreciated humanities like English reading and writing have profoundly shaped who I am as a person, in terms of developing perspective, ethics, and empathy. Being able to write fluently in English -- better than some native speakers -- has led to more job and career and romantic opportunities than math ever did. Maybe it's not a bad thing we're falling behind in math. The US still has one of the biggest economies (the wealth gap is different), and maybe that is in part because of our cultural focus on individual differentiation and a diverse curriculum, not a tunnel vision focus on rote STEM problems? Maybe kids shouldn't waste time on esoteric math that they'll likely never use in adult life anyway. It's like cursive, some aristocratic holdover from a time before everyone had smartphones, Google Sheets, etc. Just my two trauma-informed cents.

Teever 3y ago
> I never really used math again after that, even after 20 years of programming. Maybe some arithmetic here and there for bills and to split a Venmo dinner. That's about it. I don't believe this at all.
- kr0bat 3y ago
  Really, this sounds believable. How often does the average programmer use anything beyond arithmetic? I'm only a few years out of school, but I'm re-learning calculus since I haven't touched it once since college.
- solardev 3y ago
  I'm not saying that no programmers use math, but I don't -- as a run-of-the-mill frontend web dev, it's just not something I regularly encounter. The overwhelming majority of my work is composing JSX components out of other people's JSX components, spending some time in Figma or Illustrator, and then going back to the JSX to tweak some pixels. In an average month (hell, average year), the most math I do is increment some versions in package.json. Maybe the occasional CSS calc(). I'm sure if you're doing games or algorithms or data science, it'd be different, but there are many programmers who work in boring business logic, APIs, databases, etc. Relationships and concurrency and graphs, yes, but not at the lowest levels where the math is actually implemented, unless you're the person writing those libraries/frameworks (in which case, thank you!). And most people don't become any kind of programmer. I think the most advanced math I ever did was figuring out how to rotate a polygon in place, but even then we used a library and I just copied and pasted a Stack answer (https://longviewcoder.com/2020/12/15/konva-rotate-a-shape-around-any-point/ https://longviewcoder.com/2020/12/15/konva-rotate-a-shape-ar...). That was before GPT. I don't remember how to do that now, or how a sin is different from a tan, except one you confess for and the other gives you cancer. Another example was a line graph where we had to comb through several tens of thousands of data points in Javascript. Our initial implementation was terribly slow and I was tasked with improving it. I started reading about binary trees and b-trees and O(n) notation, but I had no idea what any of that meant -- I couldn't even understand the first paragraph on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation). I ended just copying some example from Stack, the search became much faster, and that was that. I never understood the math (nor do I really care to, if I'm being honest). And get this: Among the frontend devs I've worked with (again, just in regular small/med companies, not FAANG or any glorious science work), I actually had the strongest math background among them. That's only because I was an environmental science undergrad, and some of the introductory stats stuff transferred over into analytics (which, again, is something I just copy and paste from Stack or Lynda or whatever without ever actually understanding how a Pearson's correlation is different from any other correlation). To me and the people I've worked with, math was just a problem to be outsourced to someone else's implementation, same as any other NPM package or Stackoverflow answer. We worked in abstractions on top of abstractions in service to mid-managers and business needs, not in pursuit of algorithmic elegance. In my mind, that's another reason why web dev is often considered the low-hanging fruit/bastard child of "programming", still more akin to lightweight scripting and Dreamweaver/Frontpage than any real comp sci. There's a reason why 6 months of bootcamp used to be enough to do the job. ------ Just to support your point though, I once interviewed for a Canvas-based web app (as in the HTML element that lets you draw pixels), a mapping system similar to Google Maps. Their interview coding test was to make an analog clock with animated hands. I completely failed the test and was not hired. Maybe if I knew more math and algorithms :) Alas. But in the rest of my career, math was not important at all.

Teever 3y ago

> I never really used math again after that, even after 20 years of programming. Maybe some arithmetic here and there for bills and to split a Venmo dinner. That's about it. I don't believe this at all.

kr0bat 3y ago
Really, this sounds believable. How often does the average programmer use anything beyond arithmetic? I'm only a few years out of school, but I'm re-learning calculus since I haven't touched it once since college.
solardev 3y ago
I'm not saying that no programmers use math, but I don't -- as a run-of-the-mill frontend web dev, it's just not something I regularly encounter. The overwhelming majority of my work is composing JSX components out of other people's JSX components, spending some time in Figma or Illustrator, and then going back to the JSX to tweak some pixels. In an average month (hell, average year), the most math I do is increment some versions in package.json. Maybe the occasional CSS calc(). I'm sure if you're doing games or algorithms or data science, it'd be different, but there are many programmers who work in boring business logic, APIs, databases, etc. Relationships and concurrency and graphs, yes, but not at the lowest levels where the math is actually implemented, unless you're the person writing those libraries/frameworks (in which case, thank you!). And most people don't become any kind of programmer. I think the most advanced math I ever did was figuring out how to rotate a polygon in place, but even then we used a library and I just copied and pasted a Stack answer (https://longviewcoder.com/2020/12/15/konva-rotate-a-shape-around-any-point/ https://longviewcoder.com/2020/12/15/konva-rotate-a-shape-ar...). That was before GPT. I don't remember how to do that now, or how a sin is different from a tan, except one you confess for and the other gives you cancer. Another example was a line graph where we had to comb through several tens of thousands of data points in Javascript. Our initial implementation was terribly slow and I was tasked with improving it. I started reading about binary trees and b-trees and O(n) notation, but I had no idea what any of that meant -- I couldn't even understand the first paragraph on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation). I ended just copying some example from Stack, the search became much faster, and that was that. I never understood the math (nor do I really care to, if I'm being honest). And get this: Among the frontend devs I've worked with (again, just in regular small/med companies, not FAANG or any glorious science work), I actually had the strongest math background among them. That's only because I was an environmental science undergrad, and some of the introductory stats stuff transferred over into analytics (which, again, is something I just copy and paste from Stack or Lynda or whatever without ever actually understanding how a Pearson's correlation is different from any other correlation). To me and the people I've worked with, math was just a problem to be outsourced to someone else's implementation, same as any other NPM package or Stackoverflow answer. We worked in abstractions on top of abstractions in service to mid-managers and business needs, not in pursuit of algorithmic elegance. In my mind, that's another reason why web dev is often considered the low-hanging fruit/bastard child of "programming", still more akin to lightweight scripting and Dreamweaver/Frontpage than any real comp sci. There's a reason why 6 months of bootcamp used to be enough to do the job. ------ Just to support your point though, I once interviewed for a Canvas-based web app (as in the HTML element that lets you draw pixels), a mapping system similar to Google Maps. Their interview coding test was to make an analog clock with animated hands. I completely failed the test and was not hired. Maybe if I knew more math and algorithms :) Alas. But in the rest of my career, math was not important at all.