The World's Most Successful System of Problem Solving

Writing for The Observer, Conrad Wolfram argues that students the world over are being taught the wrong mathematics, with too much emphasis on calculation and too little on learning to solve problems.

We spend years, Wolfram says, teaching children to do tasks that, in the real world, we leave to computers.

"At its heart," Wolfram claims, "maths is the world's most successful system of problem solving. The point is to take real things we want to work out and apply, or invent, maths to get the answer.

Read the essay.