The Math Myth and Other STEM Delusions by Andrew Hacker

In the last decade or two, many have called for increased education in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math). As an engineer, I may hear more of it than others, or perhaps I am more attentive to it. Math, particularly algebra, trigonometry and geometry, has been seen as a foundation of STEM education with much support from the tech industry that has made it central to the Common Core curriculum used in the majority of states. However, this math requirement has become a stumbling block for many on the road to high school and college graduation. As when I was in school, students ask, “Am I ever going to need to use this?” The answer political scientist (and sometimes math professor) Andrew Hacker proposes in The Math Myth is no.

"This country has a problems. But more math is mathematics is not one of the solutions,” Andrew Hacker, The Math Myth and Other STEM Delusions

 One of the first myths that Hacker tackles is this issue of the usefulness of algebra and other higher math for STEM careers or adult life in general. Most people never need anything more advanced than arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division), including most scientist, technicians and engineers. In the 25 years since I graduated from engineering school, I have never need to solve a differential equation. Easily 80 percent of the math I do is arithmetic—possibly more. The rest is basic algebra and basic statistics. On the rare occasion I’ve needed some more esoteric piece of math, I’ve learned or relearned it on the job.

 In spite of this, the move in the U.S. has been to require four years of high school math through Algebra II or beyond, plus a college level course in algebra or more advanced math. This applies even to students who plan to study liberal arts, humanities and other subjects that make practically no use of math. This requirement is the number one academic reason people do not complete high school or college (there are other reasons, of course, but they are not related to a required class or subject). Even youth form affluent families with educated parents can find algebra to be an insurmountable hill. Hacker wonders how much human potential goes undeveloped because educational opportunities are denied to people who do not need math beyond arithmetic, but must pass an algebra course to get their diploma or degree.

 Why is math, and especially algebra, a near universal requirement? Hacker points to college math professors and their influence on lower level curricula. They want prospective students to be prepared to move to the advanced subjects they study, though only on percent of undergraduates major in math, and that drops lower in graduate schools. These same professors almost never teach the entry level (and especially not remedial) math classes in their own colleges. For colleges generally, math can be a weed-out course. Even if most students don’t really need algebra, the requirement is a quick way to knock down the number of students. (As an engineering student, my fellows and I understood the sequence of calculus and math-heavy physics classes required of us as freshmen and sophomores was a way of persuading us to study something else—I almost did.)

 Tech companies also call for a math intensive education and lots of STEM graduates. Hacker points out that, in spite of the hype, there are actually not that many STEM jobs in the U.S., nor is there a lot of growth in these fields. A glut of STEM graduates, in addition to the foreign tech labor market opened up by H1-B visas, keeps wages low in the tech sector. If there was an actual shortage, employers would respond with increased wages. Computer programmers don’t use much math and great majority of them don’t earn high salaries. Sadly, the same is increasingly true in engineering. My advice to someone interested in an engineering career would be to pursue it if you find the work interesting, but don’t do it with the expectation that you’ll get a high salary or rise quickly because of the demand for your technical skills.

 I’d like to mention one more thing that Hacker brings up. Though the math people learn in school often has no practical utility in their work or daily life, people have a knack for math and often do complex mathematical things as part of their jobs. Hacker uses the example of a carpet layer, but I have seen it in machinists, carpenters and other skilled laborers. The use and shape materials in ways that require some complex math, but they don’t write out a page full of equations. They instead apply tools and methods they have learned on the job. I’m a little fascinated by some of this tool-based, mechanical math, and it seems to be just as effective and more understandable that school math, especially since very few of us aspire to study math for its own sake.

 If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Numbers behind NUMB3RS by Keith Devlin & Gary Lorden

The Unfinished Game by Keith Devlin

 Hacker, Andrew. The Math Myth and Other STEM Delusions. New York: The New Press, 2016.

Pascal's Wager by James A. Connor

Blaise Pascal had a great impact on mathematics. He laid the foundations of our mathematical understanding of probability. A computer programming language was named for him.

Pascal was also a deeply religious man and philosopher. His book Pensées is read as a devotional by many Christians. His argument that the belief in God is rational is widely known.

James A. Connor takes the name of that argument for the name of his biography of the man, Pascal’s Wager. Connor considers both Pascal’s life in science and math and his religious convictions.

For many, there is no conflict in scientific study and religious devotion, but there was for Pascal. He was a Jansenist, though somewhat at odds with the leaders of the movement because of his interests in science and philosophy. The Jansenists were deeply concerned with sin and living a life of penitence; to pursue anything else was to embrace worldliness. Pascal loved the discoveries he made by reason and experiment, but he also longed for a life of purity and closeness to God.

Pascal was seen as a bit of a mathematical prodigy, especially in his youth when his father led a secular life by the standards of the day. He published a pamphlet on conic sections when he was 16 years old. He invented a calculating machine, the Pascaline, when he was 19. He was still fairly young by modern standards when he developed a theory of probability in a series of letter he exchanged with Pierre Fermat.

He had a mystical experience in 1654 that changed his focus in life. He told know one about it, but wrote a note about it that he kept pinned in his coat to carry with him the rest of his life. The note was discovered by his nephew shortly after his death.

After his experience, he devoted more of his time to supporting Jansenism, which his entire family had come to follow, especially his sister, Jacqueline, a nun. Jansenists were in conflict with other Catholics over their views on original sin and election, especially with the Jesuits. Pascal became an apologist for Jansenism, and especially mocked the Jesuits in The Provincial Letters.

Politics and religion were deeply linked in 17^th Century France, and the conflict between Pascal’s sect and the wider French Catholic church became a conflict with Louis XIV. He felt that the Jansenist leaders capitulated to the king and the Jesuits, which brought him into conflict with them as well.

Though religious debates had been part of his entire life, this heating up of the conflict to such a level occurred toward the end of his life. He expressed his devotion to God in self-imposed poverty and care for the poor; which in one case took the form of establishing the first public transportation system. He did not abandon math, though, and published a paper on the cycloid as well. He had been sick most of his life and passed away in 1662 at the age of 39.

Connor’s book is approachable for most readers. Though Pascal’s fame today probably rests more on his accomplishments as a mathematician, Connor shows how his life was shaped by his religion and both the religious and secular traditions of his time (Connor is a former Jesuit priest).

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Chance by Amir Aczel

The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow

How Not to Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg

The Language of God by Francis S. Collins

On a Grander Scale by Lisa Jardine

The Unfinished Game by Keith Devlin

Connor, James A. Pascal’s Wager: The Man Who Played Dice with God. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.

Mr. America by Mark Adams

Benarr Macfadden was named Bernard McFadden by his parents; he chose the modified name to suit himself. He was born into severe poverty in the Missouri Ozarks shortly after the Civil War. He would become a self-made millionaire famous for his physique, his stunts and his opinions. Mark Adams recounts his story in Mr. America.

Macfadden became fascinated with health and bodybuilding as a youth in St. Louis, where is visited a gym with his uncle. He had been sick much of his childhood, which is not surprising given the poverty, malnutrition and undeveloped medicine of the time. With hard work and a knack for self-promotion, he was eventually able to afford to join the gym (it cost $15 for an initial membership, close to $400 today).

Macfadden pursued a lot of jobs as a kid and young adult, spending very little time in school. In bodybuilding and training he found his way into a career. Particularly, he started to follow a career path that had been blazed by another strongman, Eugen Sandow. Mcfadden saw Sandow’s performances, organized by Franz Ziegfeld, Jr., at the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. He began doing a version of Sandow’s act and even took it to his distant mentor’s adopted homeland, England.

When he returned from his year in England, he brought back another idea borrowed from Sandow. He began publishing a magazine titled Physical Culture. The magazine was an outlet for him to sell exercise equipment and promote his ideas about fitness, diet, sex, nudity, marriage and other topics related to health and happiness. It was the foundation of what grew into a publishing empire in which Macfadden helped to pioneer true confession (long before Jerry Spring and Oprah Winfrey), celebrity culture and tabloid journalism. He is promotion of health information set the path for American health experts that followed with a mix of quackery and sound notions that turned out to be ahead of their time.

I’d be glad to go on about Macfadden, his accomplishment and his sometimes strange life. Instead, I should just suggest you read Mr. America.

Actually, I had been looking forward to reading Mr. America. I’ve seen Adam’s book referenced by other who have discussed Macfadden in the context of fitness, health culture and popular publishing. Macfadden led and interesting life suitable for a novel. Adam’s biography doesn’t quite read like a novel, but it is entertaining and approachable, and I recommend it to those interested in Macfadden or in the popular culture of the early 20^th Century.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

Better for All the World by Harry Bruinius

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

Life is So Good by George Dawson & Richard Glaubman

Making the American Body by Jonathan Black

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Miss Mizzou by J. B. Winter

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Rising Tide by James M. Barry

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

Adams, Mark. Mr. America: How Muscular Millionaire Bernarr Macfadden Transformed the Nation Through Sex, Salad, and the Ultimate Starvation Diet. New York: It Books, 2009.

Chief Engineer by Erica Wagner

Washington Roebling spent 14 year of his life designing and building the Brooklyn Bridge. Though originally conceived by his father, John A. Roebling, almost every aspect of the bridge conceived of and constructed from 1869 until it opened in 1883 was from the imagination and under the supervision of Washington Roebling, the chief engineer.

A lot has been written about the bridge. In Chief Engineer, Erica Wagner provides a broader picture of Roebling’s life from his youth to his productive old age.

Roebling grew up in Pennsylvania. His boyhood home was still on the frontier of settlement even in the 1830s. His formally schooling was varied, and much of his education came from assisting his father in bridge building. Though John Roebling was a successful engineer and businessman, and immigrant success story, he was abusive to his wife and children. Washington Roebling grew up to be a man who could bear hardship, but he long resented the abuse he, his siblings and especially his mother suffered in his father’s house.

Engineering was not Roebling’s only area of success. He joined Union forces during the Civil War.  Though he joined a private, his engineering experience won him an appointment and an officer and he eventually rose to the rank of colonel. His rise to the officer corps did not remove him from danger in that bloody war. Antietam, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg were just some of the battles he was part of.

The war was hard on his health, but good in other ways. It was during those years that he met his wife Emily, sister of General G. K. Warren. Emily was a vigorous, capable person who proved to be a great partner to her husband and successful on her own.

The war was not as hard on Roebling’s health as hard as the Brooklyn Bridge would be. Roebling spent a lot of time in the caissons as they sunk deeper, seeking firm foundations for the bridge towers. Prolonged work in compressed air damaged his health, possibly permanently. Though he remained in charge of the bridge, his health prevented him from being at the bridge during much of its above ground construction. Emily became his secretary and agent during this time. She was involved to such a degree that rumors spread that she was the actual engineer. There no support for the rumors that Emily was a designer of the bridge, but it is fair to say that Roebling leaned on her and her ability to organize and communicate with tact and she made important contributions to the success of the bridge.

Roebling lived a long life, surviving Emily, two of his younger brothers and even some of his nephews. Though he left an active role in the wire company his father founded, he eventually took over management of the company when his brothers who ran it, Ferdinand and Charles, and later their sons died. He seemed to relish the work and the challenge well into his eighties.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

The Brooklyn Bridge by Judith St. George

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury 

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

The Great Bridge by David McCollough

How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson

The Johnstown Flood by David McCollough

The Lighthouse Stevensons by Bella Bathurst

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Road to the Sea by Florence Dorsey

Rising Tide by James M. Barry

Wagner, Erica. Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling: The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.

Seduction of the Innocent by Max Allan Collins

Max Allan Collins takes the name of his book, Seduction of the Innocent, from the title of a notorious book by psychologist Frederic Wertham. The original was anti-comics propaganda that falsely linked comic book reading to juvenile delinquency. Collins’ novel is a pulpy crime story in which a stand-in for Wertham is murdered.

Fans of comics or pulp culture will find a lot to enjoy in this book. There are many ways to experience the frisson of recognition because many of the characters are based—to varying degrees—on real-life comic book artists, writers and publishers from the 1950s, when Wertham’s screed was published. Even the senate hearings headed by Estes Kefauver are featured in the course of the book.

The real Wertham was not murdered. Collins is careful not to make his stand-in too repulsive He acknowledges that Wertham did a lot of good work, even if his research tying comics to youth crime was bad.

The tone of the book is often silly, as you might expect from a tongue-in-cheek fictionalization of silver age comics publishing. It is still hardboiled, so there is plenty of sex and violence to go around.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

The Big Con by David W. Maurer

The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont

The Hunter adapted by Darwyn Cook

In Memory Yet Green by Isaac Asimov

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

Suggestible You by Erik Vance

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Will Eisner’s The Spirit by Darwin Cook

Collins, Max Allan. Seduction of the Innocent. London: Hard Case Crime, 2013.

My Inventions by Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla’s autobiography, collected under the title My Inventions, originally appeared as six articles in issues of Electrical Experimenter in 1919. It is a surprisingly thin book, especially in light of the several biographies that have been written about him, and the possibly greater volumes propounding the mythology of an almost demi-god genius.

To be fair, Tesla was a very creative and productive inventor. His AC motors, and the power systems that support them, enabled a new level of industrial power and automation. In many ways it was the technological foundation of the power grid we have today.

Tesla was ahead of his time and he realized it. He knew that the success of AC motors was greatly aided by coming about at the right time. Even so, it took many years from Tesla’s design to become a prototype and for that to become a commercial product with an infrastructure to support its use. At the time he wrote My Inventions, the value and practicality of his later inventions were still hard for many to see.

One of these later inventions was the radio. Tesla didn’t use that term “radio.”  It’s probably fair to say that he misunderstood the phenomena he was working with. Even so, he could produce radio transmissions and put them to practical use. As a demonstration, he built radio-controlled boats. It’s a stretch to say that Tesla envisioned smart phones, but he foresaw the possibility of using radio to transmit many kinds of data and signals, sometimes to devices “not bigger than a watch.”

“The pressure of occupation and the incessant stream of impressions pouring into our consciousness thru all the gateways of knowledge make modern existence hazardous in many ways,” Nikola Tesla, My Inventions

These articles were written at the end of World War I. Tesla reflected on the potentials of technology in peace and war. He imagined that wireless communication could shrink the world, leading to the kind of cultural exchange, common ground and commercial connections that would reinforce peace. He also imagined a rocket that could be guided to its target by radio control or internal mechanism; we could call it an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

Though visionary, he was not an infallible genius. He held to notions of physics that were not supported even by the science of his time. He had some wild ideas about psychology, biology and other fields, though some of these were no more far-out and off the mark that many that were popularly accepted by his contemporaries.

Tesla wrote very much from his own experience and perspective. Though he speaks of his upbringing in eastern Europe, his education and his career in Europe and the United States, he spends little time reflecting on the places, cultures and broader events he experience. You’ll learn more about Tesla’s peculiar ailments than about the life of youth in late-19^th Century Croatia. Perhaps that wouldn’t have sold many issues of Electrical Experimenter.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Tesla, Nikola. My Inventions. 1919. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1995.

Think 4:8 by Tommy Newberry & Lyn Smith

Think 4:8 is a daily devotional for teens written by Tommy Newberry and Lynn Smith. The central premise of the book is that we can control our thoughts, and by choosing to thinking about worthy things you can be closer to God, have better relationships, achieve more and be happier overall. The authors take this key thought from Philippians 4:8.

Each chapter in the book deals with patterns of thought, behavior and habits that can lead to joy or displeasure. Our emotions and actions are sparked by our outlook and thoughts. If we want to be generally happier and do more of what we really want, we need to develop good habits of thought.

This is a Christian book, so the principal thing, the source of joy, is to know God. Believe He has a good plan for you.

I like that the book reiterates the importance of gratitude. I think gratitude is one of the most significant contributors to happiness. Count your blessings.

Another theme that recurs in the book, not always explicitly, is the importance of discipline. The entire book is essentially about disciplining your thoughts. Proper discipline is not a burdensome thing, it is the foundation of good habits and achievement. When applied to your approach to others, it can lead to better relationships. Discipline isn’t something one suffers as a punishment, it is the effort one puts into overcoming obstacles because the results are worth it.

Each chapter in the book is short; it can be read in a few minutes. Each chapter also has exercise, which also can be completed in a few minutes. The authors encourage the reader to engage a trusted friend in many of the activities. I can imagine teens balking at that, but I suspect a teen using the devotional might have involved parents or friends in a church youth group who can smooth that over.

Though the book is written for teenagers, I think the lessons (if not always the details) are applicable to adult life as well. I never hurts to be reminded of the benefits of good mental hygiene, especially with the pressures, distractions and temptations presented by adult life.

Tommy Newberry also wrote The 4:8 Principle.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

A Complaint Free World by Will Bowen

The Joy of Supernatural Thinking by Bill Bright

Just Say Thanks! by R. T. Kendall

Philippians

Newberry, Tommy, & Lyn Smith. Think 4:8: 40 Days to a Joy-filled Life for Teens. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 2013.