>There's a hatred of mathematics in mainstream American culture that runs very, very deep Completely agreed. As an immigrant, I can say it is very much a US th

>There's a hatred of mathematics in mainstream American culture that runs very, very deep Completely agreed. As an immigrant, I can say it is very much a US thing. Haven't seen this much math-hate, but more importantly, math-utilitarianism, as in the US. In Asian countries & in Europe ( UK, France especially), people don't constantly fixate on stupid questions like "what is it good for ? ", which is ultimately a proxy for "how do I make money with this thing ?". But when I taught math here in the US as a graduate student TA, the majority of questions focussed on this single metric - usefulness. So math texts here are forced to invent bogus problems like "You want to house pigs with 500 feet of fencing. What dimensions of your rectangular pen will house the most hogs ?". Then the American kid says, Ah! Now I see the point of all this! Let l be the length of my pen and b its breadth. You want me to maximize the area of my pen lb subject to 2l+2b=500 so I can house the most pigs! Ok so I see that b = 250-l, so lb is 250l - l^2, so I take its derivative & equate to zero & l=125, b=125, and that's the biggest pen that can house the most pigs. Very nice! In other countries, you simple wouldn't come up with all these sort of bogus utilitarian problems in animal husbandry. Students here learn exponentials & Taylor expansion as part of "how do I compute compound interest on my bank account", because that's supposedly the only legitimate use of e^x ! I honestly found teaching pre-calc, calc-1 & calc-2 a complete travesty, because the theorems & the entire courseware was essentially perverted - it was all in service of how to make use of the math for some bogus application, rather than learn it for its own good. The worst was when I had to teach how the horizontal range of parabolic trajectories varied - the textbook had examples of the US bombing Japan, & the students went to work computing the best possible angle for firing the missile, so that it would fly across in a parabolic trajectory and land the farthest thus maximizing its horizontal range & kill the most number of Japanese! There was no thought given to how violent & nasty this was. I actually have very radical ideas about how things should be taught - like you must learn Rolle's theorem before learning shit like pre-calc. Learn as much of undergrad real analysis before you get into application oriented shit like calc-1, calc-2 etc. Don't bring in garbage like LCR circuitry into pde's, even though yes, you can use a third order differential equation to compute current through an LCR circuit. Applications have their place, but such an overemphasis on application is simply not healthy. It actively distorts the culture & the body politic. Note that American students don'r ask "what use is rock and roll ? otr what use is hbo ? or what use is literature ?" all those things are given a free pass. But when it comes to math, suddenly use becomes the primary criterion. Read pages 6-7, & especially 12 of Lockhart's lament, where he chooses to parody this point of view via Simplicio.