It’s never too late to stop hating math
The benefits of mathematical literacy reach far beyond the realm of numbers and equations.
By Tim Brinkhof
Americans are getting worse at math. Student scores have fallen to their lowest point in decades. Nearly half of high school students barely meet what the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) considers a “basic” level of comprehension, and more than 900 freshmen at the University of California, San Diego — 12.5% of the institution’s first-year class in 2024 — had the mathematical proficiency of a 13-year-old.
U.S. adults aren’t faring much better. Last checked, only 65% could pass a basic arithmetic test, making the country one of the more quantitatively challenged in the industrialized world.
But this isn’t the first time the math graph has trended downward. A similar development took place during the early stages of the Cold War, when enrollment in high school algebra fell to levels not seen since the start of the 20th century. It wasn’t until the launch of Sputnik in 1957, when the Soviet Union kicked off the space race, that alarm gave way to action. Math and science education were overhauled, and calculus was introduced into the curriculum.
As then, concerns about the national “math deficit” are closely tied to geopolitics. Instead of Russian rocket engineers, policymakers now worry about competition from China, India, and other emerging economies, which have for years provided Big Tech with some of its best and brightest. What will happen to the U.S. when Shenzhen overtakes Silicon Valley?
That’s one side of the coin, but the math deficit does not only affect national prosperity and security. As the U.S. Board of Education’s National Mathematics Advisory Panel stressed in a 2008 report, it also affects our quality of life. More than a launchpad to better job opportunities, math is a tool for self-improvement. It is useful in the arts, sports, and many other areas that, at first glance, seem to have little to do with numbers. To learn math, the French mathematician David Bessis writes in his book Mathematica, is to “change the way you see the world.”
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Math anxiety
Remember that dreadful feeling you got in math class? Your teacher is flying through the coursework at 100 miles per hour, and all of your classmates are nodding along; meanwhile, you’re sitting there so lost and confused that you can feel your brain spinning.
If that sounds familiar, know that you’re not alone.
According to one survey, 9 out of every 10 U.S. adults have experienced some level of math anxiety. Math anxiety is so common that even LLMs — AIs trained on vast amounts of human output — associate numbers with words like frustrating, exasperating, and alarming.
Math anxiety even shares many symptoms with regular anxiety: clammy palms, an upset stomach, increased heart rate, and lightheadedness. By activating the brain’s pain and fear centers (the insula and amygdala), math anxiety can impair your working memory and, by extension, cognitive abilities — explaining all those times you watched aghast as the equations in your textbook morphed into indecipherable hieroglyphics.
The consequences of math anxiety reach far beyond the classroom. If internalized, the all-too-recognizable belief that someone is or isn’t “a math person” can lead them to forgo a rewarding career in science, technology, medicine, or many other fields that require beyond-the-basics arithmetic skills. In extreme cases, math-anxious people may try to avoid any activity involving numbers, from balancing bank statements to measuring out ingredients for home-cooked recipes.
Learning math, therefore, often begins with learning to cope with math anxiety. Studies find that many of the techniques used for managing regular anxiety — from breathing exercises to cognitive behavioral therapy — can help with math anxiety, as well. Echoing progressive pedagogical movements from the 1960s and 1970s, many contemporary educators argue that people learn best when mathematical exercises are presented through meaningful, relevant everyday situations, revealing a seemingly abstract discipline as the practical resource it really is.
Others argue that math is best learned when it is fun. This approach not only aligns with what we know of brain development — babies and children often learn through play — but also helps address math anxiety. If someone encounters math outside the classroom, away from an impatient teacher and those intimidating textbooks, they may give the subject a second chance. That’s one explanation for the sudden and explosive popularity of “math influencers” like Andy Math and 3Blue1Brown, who have over 1.3 million followers on TikTok and 8 million subscribers on YouTube, respectively. Browse their comment sections, and you’ll find no shortage of comments like, “This just proves that maths isn’t boring” and “Never in my life did I think I’d binge-watch math videos.”
Bessis — who specializes in algebra, geometry, and topology, and achieved mathematical fame for solving a problem dating back to the Nixon presidency — says overcoming math anxiety begins with recognizing that it is shared by people at every skill level.
“Every graduate student knows [the feeling],” he tells Big Think. “You sit in a seminar, and after 20 seconds, you understand nothing. It’s not that you don’t understand some of the details or references; it’s all just nonsense. There’s no meaning. It’s probably similar to when you were an infant, listening to people speak a language you don’t understand. As an adult, you don’t expect to be in such situations, so you need confidence and awareness to avoid panicking.”
Joining the ranks of Andrew Hacker’s The Math Myth, Matt Parker’s Love Triangle, and Francis Su’s Mathematics of Human Flourishing, Bessis’ Mathematica is part of a growing body of books that, much like those aforementioned influencers, attempts to restore the reader’s relationship with math. Using only mathematical concepts a middle schooler would understand, Bessis dismantles a variety of prejudices and preconceptions left over from our schooldays.
Perhaps more importantly, Mathematica seeks to reintroduce readers to the joyful side of math — the exciting, magical side that is too often beaten out of us at school, but cherished by those who stick with the subject. Using the celebrated French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck as an example, Bessis argues math is best pursued with the mindset of a toddler: with “radical curiosity and indifference to judgment.” Think not of the panic attacks you suffered during exams, but the pride you felt when you learned to count to ten.
The fruits of math
Think also of the many ways that mathematical literacy may help improve your life, professional and private. In the early 20th century, stern schoolmasters believed math taught order, discipline, and a strong work ethic. Today’s research points to different but equally valuable benefits. Studies have found that math exercises correlate with cognitive function and metacognition (thinking about thinking) — both of which, in turn, correlate with mental health. The research also suggests that math can, directly or indirectly, improve neuroplasticity and emotional regulation, and help stave off dementia.
Contrary to the long-discredited yet persistent left brain vs. right brain myth, mathematics is useful in the arts — another field that many wrongly believe requires an innate talent to explore and enjoy. A study assessing thousands of students in China found that mathematical literacy and creative thinking go hand in hand, suggesting that one stimulates the other and vice versa.
There’s something about math that resembles the process of literary writing. It teaches you to articulate what’s real, what’s in front of you.
Similar suggestions echo throughout art history. Leonardo da Vinci and other Renaissance heavyweights could not have brought their paintings to life without a deeply technical understanding of perspective, and they often constructed their images using a variety of scientific instruments and measurement tools. More recently, saxophonist John Coltrane and drummer Clayton Cameron credited their musical success to their mathematical abilities — lived experiences that support contemporary research exploring the link between early music education and later mathematical performance.
Just as there is math in art, some mathematicians would claim that there is art in math. “When I write down a proof,” Cymra Haskell, a professor at the University of Southern California, once told her college’s newspaper, “it feels like a puzzle coming together. There can be an intense pleasure in that, similar to the pleasure I feel when I listen to a beautiful piece of music or gaze at a beautiful painting.”
More than a metaphor, her observation evokes a study that examined neural activity in 15 mathematicians. It found that looking at certain equations jump-started the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the same part of the brain responsible for perceiving and appreciating beauty.
Looking at his own creative output, Bessis proposes that his experiences as a mathematician helped him become a better writer. “There are quite a few writers who started out as mathematicians,” he says. “Victor Hugo was an accomplished math student and almost stuck with it. There’s something about math that resembles the process of literary writing. It teaches you to articulate what’s real, what’s in front of you, like describing exactly how you tie your shoes.”
Beyond self-help
Considering math’s many real-life applications, it’s no wonder that more than one reviewer has referred to Mathematica as a self-help book. Bessis disagrees with this categorization, even though he stands behind what it implies.
“It’s not a ‘ten lessons to become super smart’ book,” he says, “but inherent in there is this promise, this idea that math will make you smarter and help you see the world more clearly.”
Above all, math has made Bessis more confident and less afraid of the unknown. “After making an impact in my field at age 35,” he reflects, “I made a big bet: I quit math and reinvented myself as a writer and founder, two other territories where you’re supposed to come in equipped with rare skills. Math convinced me that those skills are not inborn; you could develop them with the right effort and focus. It made me capable of taking huge bets on my own learning ability.”
Although I am regarded as a 'smart feller' and always scored very high on both IQ and university prep courses in middle-school, I had an inherent and extreme aversion to mathematics. In fact, I am likely the Poster Child for your sketch of sitting in math class, hopelessly confused and uncertain, while the teacher speeds through lessons at Mach-1 (with all the classmates nodding to affirm complete comprehension!). My mother (a teacher) despaired at my refusal to subject myself to the intricacies of Trig, Algebra and 'higher mathematics', of course. Much later, after entering the medical profession, I was one of the first of my peers to buy a new "Reverse-Polish-Notation" HP-35 pocket calculator and covertly relied upon it to bail me out of tricky mathematics binds! Our school shrink (who would have made Freud look like a kindly old, doddering uncle) called it a 'Math block' and basically wrote off any future efforts by me to aspire to rocket science. Thus, I can relate wholly and utterly to the subject you discussed here. Unfortunately, I am now beyond the pale and still have my old HP-35, which I keep handy for tricky quadrilateral equations like {1+1=2}. Thanks for bringing those tortuous days as the math class dummy back to me in full, traumatic, prismatic recall! Urrrk!
Two observations from my life about math:
First, when my daughter, now well into adulthood, was in middle school and having trouble understanding math, her teacher said she shouldn't concern herself with understanding math, but to just remember the formulae! No icea how he came to be a teacher.
Second, I'm continually amazed when paying cash for something in a store, no cashier I've come across under the age of 50 or thereabouts has any idea of how to make change without the register giving the answer, not can they make sense of my giving therm, say, $1.08 for a $0.98 purchase, hoping to relieve my pocket of a nickel and 3 pennies to get a dime in return.
I despair.