It isn’t just the media. Here in Canada, the government literally passed the mathematics curriculum which claimed nonsense like “mathematics is subjective” and “mathematics is colonial”. I emailed them a long rant that I would rather ship my future kids to India for a better education instead of the nonsense they are teaching.
So no, it isn’t just some media. Nor do I follow corporate news.
> An equitable mathematics curriculum recognizes that mathematics can be subjective. Mathematics is often positioned as an objective and pure discipline. However, the content and the context in which it is taught, the mathematicians who are celebrated, and the importance that is placed upon mathematics by society are subjective. Mathematics has been used to normalize racism and marginalization of non-Eurocentric mathematical knowledges, and a decolonial, anti-racist approach to mathematics education makes visible its historical roots and social constructions. The Ontario Grade 9 mathematics curriculum emphasizes the need to recognize and challenge systems of power and privilege, both inside and outside the classroom, in order to eliminate systemic barriers and to serve students belonging to groups that have been historically disadvantaged and underserved in mathematics education.
After I along with a bunch of others emailed them, they got rid of it. However no one was fired for writing such nonsense, nor did we figure out how such nonsense got through the top officials in the government. Here's the news on them removing it:
Please don't copy and paste the same comment multiple times. That's spamming. People can read the rest of the exchange where I already linked to it (specifically to avoid spamming), along with the link to the original source but not my own comment as you falsely accuse.
You are projecting while accusing me of projecting. As I noted, the reason I put this comment is because you copy pasted your comment. Stop projecting and then accusing me of projecting.
"There's plenty of room for subjective opinion in mathematics. It usually doesn't concern questions of the form Is this true? since we have a good consensus how to recognize an acceptable proof and which assumptions for such a proof you need to state explicitly.
As soon as we move onwards to Is this useful? and Is this interesting?, or even Is this likely to work?, subjectivity hits us in full force. Even in pure mathematics, it's easy to choose a set of axioms and derive consequences from them, but if you want anyone to spend time reading your work, you need to tackle the subjective questions and have an explanation why what you're doing is either useful or interesting, or preferably both.
In applied math, these questions are accompanied by Is this the best way to model such-and-such real-world problem? -- where "best" again comes down to usefulness (does the model answer questions we need to have answered?) and interest (does the model give us any insight about the situation we wouldn't have without it?).
The subjective questions are important in research, but can also arise at more elementary level. The high-school teacher who chooses to devote several lessons to presenting Cardano's method for solving the generic third-degree equation will certainly have to answer his students' questions why this is useful or interesting. Perhaps he has an answer. Perhaps he has an answer that the students don't agree with. In that case, he cannot look for a deductive argument concluding that Cardano's formula is interesting -- he'll have to appeal to emotions, curiosity, all of those fluffy touchy-feely considerations that we need to use to tackle subjective questions."
https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1354044/can-math-be....
