Making maths beautiful
The importance of math to jobs, society and thinking has exploded over the last few decades. Meanwhile, math education has gotten stuck or has even slipped backward. Why has this chasm opened up? It's all about computers: when they do the calculating, people can work on harder questions, try more concepts, and play with a multitude of new ideas. Conrad Wolfram will discuss a new project to build a completely new math curriculum with computer-based computation at its heart - alongside a campaign to refocus math education away from historical hand-calculating techniques and toward relevant and conceptually interesting topics.