Book Review: A Mathematician's Lament

Plumfield Moms

“The first thing to understand is that mathematics is an art. The difference between math and the other arts, such as music and painting, is that our culture does not recognize it as such.”

There is an astonishing amount of power and truth packed into this 140-page book. If, like me, you feared and resented math in school because it made you feel stupid, perhaps you will understand why Lockhart’s lament almost had me crying by the end of the second chapter. Crying for “what if?” What if I had had even one math teacher in school who had loved mathematics as an art and taught it as such? What if even one of my teachers had given me time to explore the beauty of patterns and have ideas about them? What if, sometime in my twelve years of school, even one teacher had believed, “Being a mathematician is not so much about being clever . . . it’s about being aesthetically sensitive and having refined and exquisite taste”?