What is Mathematics?

Mathematics is an old, broad, and deep discipline (field of study). People working to improve
math education need to understand "What is Mathematics?"
A Tidbit of History
Mathematics as a formal area of teaching and learning was developed about 5,000 years ago by
the Sumerians. They did this at the same time as they developed reading and writing. However,
the roots of mathematics go back much more than 5,000 years.
Throughout their history, humans have faced the need to measure and communicate about time,
quantity, and distance. The Ishango Bone is a bone tool handle approximately 20,000 years old.

Figure 1
The picture given below shows Sumerian clay tokens whose use began about 11,000 years ago
(seehttp://www.sumerian.org/tokens.htm). Such clay tokens were a predecessor to reading,
writing, and mathematics.

Figure 2
The development of reading, writing, and formal mathematics 5,000 years ago allowed the
codification of math knowledge, formal instruction in mathematics, and began a steady
accumulation of mathematical knowledge.
Mathematics as a Discipline
A discipline (an organized, formal field of study) such as mathematics tends to be defined by the
types of problems it addresses, the methods it uses to address these problems, and the results it
has achieved. One way to organize this set of information is to divide it into the following three
categories (of course, they overlap each other):
1. Mathematics as a human endeavor. For example, consider the math of
measurement of time such as years, seasons, months, weeks, days, and so on. Or,
consider the measurement of distance, and the different systems of distance
measurement that developed throughout the world. Or, think about . There is a
rich history of human development of mathematics and mathematical uses in our
modern society.
2. Mathematics as a discipline. You are familiar with lots of academic disciplines
such as archeology, biology, chemistry, economics, history, psychology,
sociology, and so on. Mathematics is a broad and deep discipline that is
continuing to grow in breadth and depth. Nowadays, a Ph.D. research dissertation
in mathematics is typically narrowly focused on definitions, theorems, and proofs
related to a single problem in a narrow subfield in mathematics.
3. Mathematics as an interdisciplinary language and tool. Like reading and writing,
math is an important component of learning and "doing" (using one's knowledge)

in each academic discipline. Mathematics is such a useful language and tool that it
is considered one of the "basics" in our formal educational system.
To a large extent, students and many of their teachers tend to define mathematics in terms of
what they learn in math courses, and these courses tend to focus on #3. The instructional and
assessment focus tends to be on basic skills and on solving relatively simple problems using
these basic skills. As the three-component discussion given above indicates, this is only part of
mathematics.
Even within the third component, it is not clear what should be emphasized in curriculum,
instruction, and assessment. The issue of basic skills versus higher-order skills is particularly
important in math education. How much of the math education time should be spent in helping
students gain a high level of accuracy and automaticity in basic computational and procedural
skills? How much time should be spent on higher-order skills such as problem posing, problem
representation, solving complex problems, and transferring math knowledge and skills to
problems in non-math disciplines?
Beauty in Mathematics
Relatively few K-12 teachers study enough mathematics so that they understand and appreciate
the breadth, depth, complexity, and beauty of the discipline. Mathematicians often talk about the
beauty of a particular proof or mathematical result. Do you remember any of your K-12 math
teachers ever talking about the beauty of mathematics?
G. H. Hardy was one of the world's leading mathematicians in the first half of the 20th century.
In his book "A Mathematician's Apology" he elaborates at length on differences between pure
and applied mathematics. He discusses two examples of (beautiful) pure math problems. These
are problems that some middle school and high school students might well solve, but are quite
different than the types of mathematics addressed in our current K-12 curriculum. Both of these
problems were solved more than 2,000 years ago and are representative of what mathematicians
do.
1. A rational number is one that can be expressed as a fraction of two integers. Prove
that the square root of 2 is not a rational number. Note that the square root of 2
arises in a natural manner as one uses land-surveying and carpentering techniques.

2. A prime number is a positive integer greater than 1 whos only positive integer
divisors are itself and 1. Prove that there are an infinite number of prime numbers.

In recent years, very large prime numbers have emerged as being quite useful in
encryption of electronic messages.

Problem Solving
The following diagram can be used to discuss representing and solving applied math problems at
the K-12 level. This diagram is especially useful in discussions of the current K-12 mathematics
curriculum.

Figure 3
The six steps illustrated are 1) Problem posing; 2) Mathematical modeling; 3) Using a
computational or algorithmic procedure to solve a computational or algorithmic math problem;
4) Mathematical "unmodeling"; 5) Thinking about the results to see if the Clearly-defined
Problem has been solved,; and 6) Thinking about whether the original Problem Situation has
been resolved. Steps 5 and 6 also involve thinking about related problems and problem situations
that one might want to address or that are created by the process or attempting to solve the
original Clearly-defined Problem or resolve the original Problem Situation.
Final Remarks
Here are four very important points that emerge from consideration of the diagram in Figure 3
and earlier material presented in this section:
1. Mathematics is an aid to representing and attempting to resolve problem
situations in all disciplines. It is an interdisciplinary tool and language.
2. Computers and calculators are exceedingly fast, accurate, and capable at doing
Step 3.
3. Our current K-12 math curriculum spends the majority of its time teaching
students to do Step 3 using the mental and physical tools (such as pencil and

paper) that have been used for hundreds of year. We can think of this as teaching
students to compete with machines, rather than to work with machines.
4. Our current mathematics education system at the PreK-12 levels is unbalanced
between lower-order knowledge and skills (with way too much emphasis on Step
#3 in the diagram) and higher-order knowledge and skills (all of the other steps in
the diagram). It is weak in mathematics as a human endeavor and as a discipline
of study.
There are three powerful change agents that will eventually facilitate and force major changes in
our math education system.

Brain Science, which is being greatly aided by brain scanning equipment and
computer mapping and modeling of brain activities, is adding significantly to our
understanding of how the brain learns math and uses its mathematical knowledge
and skills.

Computer and Information Technology is providing powerful aids to many

different research areas (such as Brain Science), to the teaching of math (for
example, through the use of highly Interactive Intelligent Computer-Assisted
Learning, perhaps delivered over the Internet), to the content of math (for
example, Computational Mathematics), and to representing and automating the
"procedures" part of doing math.

The steady growth of the totality of mathematical knowledge and its applications
to representing and helping to solving problems in all academic disciplines.

Source: http://pages.uoregon.edu/moursund/Math/mathematics.htm

Survival mathematics
It ma y be helpful to distinguish three categories of mathematics. First, there is survival
mathematics: that is, the mathematics that we need in order to go about our daily business and
make good use of our leisure time. Some people refer to this as 'the basics' or 'the core
curriculum'; but this seems to imply that these needs are the same for everybody, which is clearly
not true. City dwellers use different mathematics from those who live in a village; a lawyer's
mathematical needs are different from those of a housewife (though neither would admit to
'using mathematics' in their work); if your hobby is photography, you want different mathematics
from a person who plays football. Survival mathematics is a reflection of our personal life-style.

And yet it has certain common features for all of us. First, we almost always have to use it in a
situation that requires an immediate response: paying a bus fare, deciding where a tree is going
to fall, estimating the date for the completion of a contract, getting each dish in the oven at the
right time, choosing the right camera exposure, positioning oneself to intercept an attack by the
opposing forwards. Second, it is rarely carried out with paper and pencil (or even with a pocket
calculator). Third, one is hardly aware that one is using mathematics at all. And this means that
survival mathematics has little to do with formal mathematical instruction. The very process of
taking a problem out of a textbook in a lesson called mathematics, and writing the answer in an
exercise book in one's own time, makes it largely an irrelevance as far as survival mathematics is
concerned. This does not mean that mathematics teachers cannot help children to acquire the
mathematics they need. But it is an illusion to suppose that this can be left to mathematics
teachers alone. Other teachers, parents, elder brothers and sisters all have a part to play. In this
sense, every teacher must expect to be a teacher of mathematics. For the most part, survival
mathematics comes like most other survival skillssuch as crossing the road, reading a ma p or
telling the timeby experiment, using the experience of any older person who happens to be on
hand to help.

Mathematics for use

Next, much of the mathematics in the school curriculum is mathematics for use. This extends
from quite simple skills, such as decimal arithmetic, up to advanced topics such as the use of
differential calculus to find maximum and minimum values. It describes all the mathematics that
some people need in order to do their work successfully, over and above what we have already
described as survival mathematics. T h e difficulty with most of the mathematics in this category
is that it is job-specific; only a minority of people will ever use any particular piece of
mathematics. For example, engineers and navigators obviously need to know some trigonometry,
a subject that is of no use whatsoever for pharmacists and bank employees. Economists need to
understand statistics, but not electricians. And, of course, few children at school can be sure what
work they will do in later life. This presents us with a curricular problem: should we try to teach
every mathematical topic that might be needed later by some member H o w important is
learning mathematics? Of the class? Since amongst thirty or forty children we ma y find a wide
variety of career possibilities, this would be a sure recipe for an overloaded curriculum. Or
should we restrict ourselves to some general topicssuch as proportion, the properties of some
common geometrical figures, and substitution in formulaewith which man y of the pupils will
need an acquaintance? If we adopt this latter course, we ma y find ourselves left with rather a
small mathematics curriculumespecially since, as some recent research carried out in England
has shown, 1 most employees use much less mathematics in their jobs than is commonly
believed. And a corollary of this policy would be the need to incorporate more mathematics into
subsequent specialized vocational training than we do at present. Of course, mathematics is also
an essential tool for the scientist, and this has often been used to justify the inclusion of particular
mathematical topics in the curriculum. Certainly it is desirable to have an interdisciplinary
perspective in designing any mathematics curriculum. But this is an argument which can easily
be carried too far. The usual assumption is that pupils should first learn the mathematics, and
then apply it in the science lesson. However, if this means that they are expected to learn it in an

abstract form, divorced from the context which could give it meaning for the pupils and before
they have the requisite conceptual background, they ma y well fail to master it; and the failure in
mathematics can lead to frustration in the science lesson as well. Much science teaching in
schools is too dependent on mathematical skills; for man y pupils these can get in the way of
learning the science. We also need to recognize that mathematics for use is something which
changes with time. An obvious example is calculation with logarithms, which until quite recently
was an essential accomplishment for anyone who had to carry out complicated calculations.
Nowadays, when every person who has the need to do such calculations is likely to have access
to a pocket calculator, this skill has become almost obsolete.

Mathematicians' mathematics
There are some who would claim that so far there has been nothing in this article about
mathematics. 'Real' mathematics, they would argue, is about definitions, proof and abstract
structures. Most curricula contain something of this kind of mathematics: for example prime
numbers, geometrical theorems, and sets. We might call it mathematicians' mathematics. It
would be wrong to imagine that a hard line should be drawn between this and the mathematics
referred to previously. These is certainly a place for logical reasoning in teaching mathematics
from a utilitarian point of view; for much of the power of mathematics lies in the connection
between facts, so that a little remembered knowledge can produce a large amount of derived
knowledge. If mathematics is worth its place in the curriculum, it should certainly be learnt in
such a way as to bring out these relations. There are also other aspects of mathematicians'
mathematics. Think of the pleasure which man y people get from solving mathematical puzzles
and playing games with a mathematical structure; or the sense of personal achievement which
can result from investigating number patterns (for example, that the answers to the sums i+2+i,
1+2+3+2+1 , 1+2+3+4+3+2+1 , etc., are respectively 4, 9, 16, etc., the successive square
numbers), with their possibilities for making conjectures about the way in which the pattern
continues, and even of trying to explain why . The n there are parts of mathematics which can
only be described as 'delightful'. Quite small children enjoy trying to count as far as they can, by
extending the numeration system (c . . . eighty . . . ninety . . . ninety-nine . . . twenty (!).. .
twenty-one (!!) . . .'); and man y people can appreciate the fact that any map , however
complicated, can be colored with just four crayons, or that in the figure shown here (Fig. 1) the
three points marked with dots lie in a straight line wherever the six points marked with small
rings are taken on the circlethough establishing these facts calls for advanced mathematics. It
is not difficult to argue that all children should have a chance to experience this kind of
mathematics, although by itself it could hardly justify the central place in the school curriculum
that the subject currently enjoys. There is also the argument that learning this kind of
mathematics 'teaches one to think'. But the evidence for this assertion is unconvincing. It is of the
nature of mathematics that its field of operation is very narrow, but that within this field one is
tied by a strict logical regime; the forms of reasoning encountered in mathematics are rarely
applicable in a wider context. Certainly learning mathematics gives practice in analyzing the
meaning of statements, marshaling evidence, discarding what is irrelevant, and so on; but so does
learning a language, or studying a novel, or making sense of a political situation. Mathematics

ma y exhibits the purest form of reasoning, but from an educational point of view this can be
regarded as its weakness as well as its strength.

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