The Gap of Today’s Math Education: Rigor

This professor criticized the lack of rigor in today’s math education, in particular, there exists universally a prevalent ‘ambiguous’ gap between high school and undergraduate math education.

I admire his great insight which is obvious to those postwar baby boomer generation.

I remember I was the last Singapore batch or so (early 70s) taking the full Euclidean Geometry course at 15 years old, and strangely in that year of Secondary 3 Math (equivalent to 3ème in Baccalaureate) my (Chinese) school had 2 separate math teacher for Geometry and Elementary/Additional (E./A.) Math.

Guess what ? the Geometry teacher was an Art teacher. It turned out it was a blessing in disguise, as my class of average Math students who hated E./A. Maths all scored 90% distinctions in Geometry. We did not treat Geometry like the other boring maths. The lady Art teacher started on the first day from Euclid’s 5 axioms…