Why Math? What Math?
F07
Jason Zimba

Should everybody know a little math? Should everybody know a lot? Should everybody know more than they do? Should you know more than you do? What for?

What should a degree from Bennington mean about a person's comfort with quantitative methods - and why do we care anyway? What would we teach if we wanted our College to graduate students year after year who could go out into the world and make a real impact on problems of importance—social problems, problems of health and well-being, problems of war and genocide? If math could support us in this goal—and it remains to be seen if it can - how should it do so? How should we organize ourselves as a College to allow it to happen?

This is a very unusual way of talking about math, its uses, and its promise. We aren't looking to mathematicians to tell us what math is and why we should learn it. We aren't looking to politicians to tell us that we should be learning more science and math so that America can remain competitive with India and China. We are asking what math offers us for our own purposes, and how we can best go about getting it.

Our primary goal is to engage with the questions listed above and try to answer them. To anchor our discussion and keep us focused on outcomes, we shall consider ourselves provisionally to be working towards a preliminary design for a first-year math program at Bennington College. In the process of figuring out how to do this, we may well decide to do something else entirely. Additional outcomes may include an outline for a proposal to external funders for support of the program.