Athini Mafu argues that the misperception and the negative view of mathematics stems from the way it is taught. He contends that the art of Mathematical reasoning and how various topics within mathematics relate to each other should be introduced at school level.
To properly give an answer to the question of “how to make Mathematics more accessible” I will discuss my brief journey with mathematics and how it has been presented to me at different stages in my education. This will give a better context as to why I believe my answer would make Mathematics more accessible to people.
My earliest memories of Mathematics was in the first grade when we were first introduced to addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. I remember this as being satisfying. Being able to take the difference of two numbers then add it to the smaller number and get the larger again! Looking back, I think that this made mathematics look very concrete and I liked how everything fit together like puzzle pieces. This was my general experience with mathematics in primary school. Most math concepts made sense in this way.
By grade five, I started participating in Math olympiads. This opened up my view on what Mathematics was. I would always struggle in the later rounds as I would regularly not even be able to understand the questions. This paradoxically made me enjoy mathematics more as I wanted to know why I couldn’t understand how to approach those questions, let alone solve them. I thought the more I did high school mathematics, the closer I would get to finding an answer, but unfortunately, I didn’t. I would only understand why I couldn’t years later when I took the course on the foundations of Abstract Mathematics. High school Mathematics was enjoyable, yet it seemed a little surface-level. No matter the section or the topic, I would always wonder how these formulae and laws had been derived. I would think of Euclid and Pythagoras and be in awe of how they could discover such fundamental truths. At this point, Mathematics had a veil of mystery that I was unable to lift. The mathematics we learned in school was fun but shallow and I felt more like recognizing patterns and applying a memorized formula instead of actually doing mathematics. I felt like the real good stuff was behind this veil which I was not ‘worthy’ to lift and I felt reminded of that every time I would encounter an olympiad question that I didn’t even know how to approach let alone understand.
Foundations of Abstract Mathematics changed a lot of how I thought in general. It taught me the process of mathematical reasoning. This was at first very painful but became fun and exciting as we learned more. I felt so empowered. Looking back, I think that’s the problem as to why mathematics is not more accessible. Most people are taught mathematics from an early age but very few ever get taught the art/science of mathematical reasoning. This seems to me very odd and the main reason why mathematics is so misunderstood. People are given the problem without being properly equipped with the mental tools to be able to solve the problem. I feel that I struggled with Olympiad questions because I was never taught the process of mathematical reasoning. I think that as soon as we first introduce mathematics to children, we should also introduce mathematical reasoning to them. How to think about a problem, how to ask the right questions to better understand the problem, how is problem A related to problem B at a fundamental level, and so on. This way I believe people will not only better understand mathematics, but will come to truly appreciate its beauty and the expanse.
Athini Mafu
Bsc Mathematical Computer Sciences, Stellenbosch University
