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The Math(s) Fix: An Education Blueprint for the AI Age Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Conrad Wolfram (Author, Narrator), Wolfram Media (Publisher)
4.3 out of 5 stars 114 ratings

Why are we all taught math for years of our lives? Does it really empower everyone? Or does it fail most and disenfranchise many? Is it crucial for the AI age or an obsolete rite of passage?

The Math(s) Fix: An Education Blueprint for the AI Age is a groundbreaking book that exposes why math education is in crisis worldwide and how the only fix is a fundamentally new mainstream subject. It argues that today's math education is not working to elevate society with modern computation, data science, and AI. Instead, students are subjugated to compete with what computers do best and lose.

This is the only book to explain why being bad at math may be as much the subject's fault as the learners: how a stuck educational ecosystem has students, parents, teachers, schools, employers, and policymakers running in the wrong direction to catch up with real-world requirements. But it goes further, too, for the first time setting out a completely alternative vision for a core computational school subject to fix the problem and seed more general reformation of education for the AI age.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

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  1. Listening Length
    8 hours and 38 minutes
  2. Author
    Conrad Wolfram
  3. Narrator
    Conrad Wolfram
  4. Audible release date
    June 21, 2021
  5. Language
    English
  6. Publisher
    Wolfram Media
  7. ASIN
    B0977N1JDL
  8. Version
    Unabridged
  9. Program Type
    Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length 8 hours and 38 minutes
Author Conrad Wolfram
Narrator Conrad Wolfram
Whispersync for Voice Ready
Audible.com Release Date June 21, 2021
Publisher Wolfram Media
Program Type Audiobook
Version Unabridged
Language English
ASIN B0977N1JDL
Best Sellers Rank

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4.3 out of 5 stars
114 global ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Potter
    5.0 out of 5 stars "Make first-rate human problem-solvers, not third-rate human calculators"
    Reviewed in the United States on July 21, 2021
    Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
    A thorough and in depth look at the massive short comings of outdated math education with a clear eyed vision of the difficulty of pushing for change. So much of this book rang true to me as a student of science who had difficulty with math in school but now uses computers to succeed in a scientific career. If you are in anyway involved with math, science, or computer, education, I beg you, please read this book.
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  • Chris Smith
    4.0 out of 5 stars Makes some very good points. Too bad it succumbs to author's biases in places
    Reviewed in the United States on July 9, 2020
    Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
    A very good book. The central idea, that math classes in schools are all about doing the calculations by hand, while math applications are about setting up the model and interpreting the results, is very sound. The argument that technology in the classroom can bring students closer to authentic mathematics is promising, although the devil is in the details (which are not discussed in this book). A thoughtful reader could still learn a lot from this book.

    The one big criticism I have is that the author likes to adopt the same lazy anti-expert and anti-teacher biases that are unfortunately all too common. Conrad Wolfram doesn't seem to admit that teachers are already grappling with how to help students analyze issues mathematically and interpret results... he dismisses most of these efforts based on a theory that simplifying the problem makes it useless and students need to only work on complex examples. This bias of his is at odds with everything we know about the cognitive science of learning. At one point, he even goes as far as to admit that he implicitly distrusts mathematicians say about which skills and concepts are fundamental to mathematics, versus his organization's reductionist black-box approaches.

    These flaws don't make the book bad. It's still well worth reading. Just don't treat its author as some kind of messiah. He's right about some things, and wrong about others -- just like the rest of us.
    25 people found this helpful
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  • Jeff D. Sandefer
    5.0 out of 5 stars If only we had the right learner driven platform for Computational Thinking.
    Reviewed in the United States on November 28, 2020
    Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
    A must-read book for anyone who cares about the next generation of world changers.

    Conrad and Stephen Wolfram are right on target about the power of Computational Thinking. Now we need a Khan Academy-like platform so young people can access the tools while bypassing traditional education.
    4 people found this helpful
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  • RCharles
    3.0 out of 5 stars Perspective
    Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2024
    Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
    Conrad Wolfram’s ideas aren’t wrong but they aren’t completely right either. He’s arguing for an inquiry based problem solving way of teaching math. The problem is that without some of the computational skills there isn’t a lot you do with young people.

    It’s as useful as teaching probability without fractions. Wolfram is correct that math anxiety does get in the way of teaching math, but I believe the lack of math skills is still really important.

    I don’t believe he’s made his case.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Frank Steele
    5.0 out of 5 stars A call to change and keep changing
    Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2020
    Format: Hardcover
    This book takes a question that every math student has asked at one time or another (“Why am I learning all this stuff, and what good is it?”) and addresses it in detail: What’s wrong with math, why it’s wrong, and how to go about making it right—fixing it. Basically (and this is a 336-page book, so I’m really simplifying it here), math is often stuck in the past, teaching students how to perform calculations by hand that are done far better and quicker by computer. Students have to learn precise and intricate ways of doing things in math that will have little relevance to their later professional lives, leaving them discouraged and uninterested in math, while nearly every trade is becoming more dependent on the sort of computational thinking and problem-solving they’re not learning (and that they’re learning not to like).

    It’s discouraging for those who try to teach them as well. Years ago, I spent a few hours trying to help some young friends with high school math problems (I’d had calculus and differential equations in university, so how hard could it be, right?), and I got frustrated very quickly. The calculations had to be done a certain way, whether it was logical or not, and it wasn’t logical, it took longer, and led to all of us feeling frustrated and disgusted.

    The author says, “It is simply unsustainable to have an ever-widening chasm between the content of the core educational subject [math] and the needs outside. My aim in this book has been to chart a path for this fundamental change—not only clarity about what’s wrong but theoretically and practically how to put it right.” Bravo, Conrad!

    I enjoyed the book, and I thought anyone interested in educational change (not just in math) would find it interesting, because in the second part of the book the author gets into detail about change, the forces that resist it and the forces and personal initiatives that can bring it to pass. Since Conrad Wolfram is an expert on the subject and passionate about it, sometimes there’s more detail than the average reader might be interested in. That’s one of the few things I didn’t enjoy about the book, but I learned to just skim those parts and move on to the more interesting sections. Of course, if I’d been a math teacher or a mathematician, I might have found that fascinating. At times I also had to pause and translate the author’s British English into American English. As they say, the United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language.

    All in all, though, I thought the time I spent reading this book was worth it, and I appreciate receiving a copy of this book to review and express my honest opinion. Honestly, it left me with a lot to think about, because as the author put it, “There’s a call not just to change, but to be willing to keep changing and progressing.” And there are things in my life (including how I use math in my profession) that I want to reexamine, change, and make better. I hope math is made better. The world needs it, among other necessary changes.
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  • jose
    5.0 out of 5 stars Es un libro crítico, que abre posibilidades en la enseñanza de las matemáticas
    Reviewed in Mexico on July 13, 2021
    Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
    El contenido crítico y su redacción clara
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  • Amazon Customer
    5.0 out of 5 stars Readable and Well-argued Suggestions for Change
    Reviewed in Canada on November 30, 2023
    Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
    As one of those people who did well both in traditional maths classes in the 1960s to 1980s and on the competitions in high school that needed more than just traditional rote learning, I can appreciate this book. In high school, my maths teacher once asked me how to solve a problem. All his methods were beyond what we had taken to that point. I used methods of that chapter, and he appreciated the solution.
    I disagree with some small points. Sometimes one needs to be able to derive things by hand to show where computational systems are giving wrong or unhelpful answers. I provide 2 cases in point.
    1. Microsoft Excel got the hyperbolic sine of small numbers completely wrong for at least 15 years (1998 to at least 2013). I had been using Borland Quatro, which did not have that function, so I needed to calculate it accurately. Knowing the series expansion meant I could program it. The naive calculation (exp(x)-exp(-x))/2 fails due to catastrophic cancellation and gave the same WRONG answer as Excel gave.
    2. Looking up integrals is still helpful! In a recent case, Wolfram Mathematica provides an answer in terms of a function that is not continuous over the range of the problem. Thus, the answer was an error message. By looking up the integral in my university calculus textbook, I got a solution that was well-behaved over the entire range of the problem.
    The book is not perfect of course. He mentions his mother's book "Philosophical Logic: An Introduction" without giving his mother's name, Sybil Wolfram, publisher or date of publication. This makes it more difficult to find that book. Is he not royalties from his late mother's book? :-) He uses an example from her book without reference. Perhaps a picky point from an academic writer.
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  • Yoni
    4.0 out of 5 stars An idea whose time has definitely come
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 14, 2023
    Format: KindleVerified Purchase
    The book starts off excellent, but then loses steam around the midpoint, and somewhat becomes a semi-veiled ad for Mathematica and the Wolfram language.
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  • Joseph Lai
    5.0 out of 5 stars Math(fix)
    Reviewed in Canada on December 17, 2020
    Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
    innovative and thought provoking. A must read for math lovers
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