I do not disagree with you, but this is not answering his arguments. Math is the language of science[...]. There are many ways to learn a language, but I think

I do not disagree with you, but this is not answering his arguments. Math is the language of science[...]. There are many ways to learn a language, but I think they all have something in common. You have to spend a lot of time learning, reading and writing. The writing is quite important. You have to write the language to be good at it. He's not arguing that scientists should drop writing math altogether (although you have to admit that they are spending huge amount of efforts making the computers do the calculation for them). He's addressing the more general issue of "teaching math in elementary schools". Why do we do it today? not everyone is going to be a scientist! The thing about math is that currently to write as it is supposed to look like can only be done most conveniently on paper. Writing a math formula in Mathematica or Wolfram alpha requires a latex-like mini language[...]. Yeah writing math formulas on a computer is a pain. But: - you and I come from a generation of pen and paper math solving. The idea of markup annotation of your text is still very young, but is it so far fetched to imagine that in few generations, all text will be filled with metadata and tags? LaTeX is a pain because of our current primitive keyboards and screens. - more people should work towards improving this. Wolfram Alpha is doing good things, they're not the only ones working on this either, but we still need to bring more attention to the issue. Also, who cares if he sells WA. Let's talk about his idea, not his persona.