ad-free
Channel / Source:
TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-09-13
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdiZaTBmsvc
I hope you can hear me it's great to be here in front of you and talk to you about what I did and what I'm what I'm thinking about all day long so let's start with this guy in nineteen sixty one John F. Kennedy uttered the words we choose them by doing so he declared that the west would try to take the lead in space race
and by that reclaim the upper hand in one of the most intense periods of the Cold War the words of John F. Kennedy work call of duty for the scientists of that time just to just think about that just think about the challenge to let human take a stroll on the moon right to put a human on the moon just think about the challenge that has
that must have been at that time for the scientist it must have seemed impossible so what did the scientists do debated spared the dead the client that they say no no they didn't they sat down and thought about the problem they said okay let's think about it how could we saw this huge challenge and their approach was to break it down so let's break it down
step one well we need to bring the astronauts up there right when we need to bring them to the moon and now we need for that we need a couple of rockets we need to do a couple of computations because we don't want to see past the moon we want to go on the moon and then of course step to we want to walk around on
the moon implant or beautiful flag and tell the world where the best Reid we're the best and for that of course we are when you the suit because no oxygen lots of radiation and kind of cold so that's what they said okay we need a suit and we can do that too and step three of course is we want to bring our guys back home safe
and sound to the families and friends of them right and they said okay what do we need for that well we don't want them to burn up in the atmosphere so let's compute the right angle of entry and we don't want them to crash into the ground so let's slow them down a bit and that's how you did it what a couple of parachutes and landing
them in the sea and the homeland what they did is they broke the problem down into smaller steps they have one big challenge and they broke it down into step one step two step three and what the scientists of that time did is they did it again and again with each of these challenges until they could answer every question that arose every single problem they could
sing think of in this context was soft creatively they did it through logic to keep creativity they did it by breaking the problem down dated it by applying known patterns to new problems in overcoming the challenge the scientists of that time that something that is incredible they put a man on the moon and now you might ask me why should I care about that why should
I care about bringing up a man on the moon well of course and thankfully but everyone's your house to bring the man on the moon everyone has to get the lead in the space race for the U. S. but still every single one of us is confronted with big problems and challenges in their day to day lives they're just too big to soften one swing and
we can think of numerous examples of that well I'm let's say holding a tent talking lots of P. in front of lots of people you can't do that overnight up or commencing your boss of an idea that he's not fond of but you know that's a crucial point for the company or when you want to bother you plausible excuse why you were late to class very
simple thing everyone knows very few things we do in life don't require this kind of thinking don't require this kind of step by step thinking but the fascinating part about the stinking is that we acquired this we learn this this is implanted in our brains through math education so normally when we look at math education we look at something like this a complicated formula formula an
equation and its solution but one method occasions actually about is how we got from there to there how we got from a to B. how we got from the problem to the solution math education is actually about the little spaces in between the formulas that's about the hands but this because that is about the implications about the equivalences master be education is about having the curiosity
to go into uncharted territory and to understand things you didn't understand before math education is about having a big problem that you're confronted with and breaking it down so that you can solve it math education is about understanding and recognizing known patterns in new problems to overcome the challenge we can sum all of that up in a couple of words math education above everything else teaches
you logic creativity and patter rocket recognition these are skills that are universal they go well beyond formula our function they can tell you whether you pay more less in the grocery shop for the salad or this one they can tell you whether you'll you'll make the goals your company set and they can even put a man on the moon so these things are crucial to us
and we as individuals should strive to understand math if we see this we should as a society strive to turn out a lot of people understand this so let's go away from this cute example to the world of cold hard facts I mathematicians I like that math education and its impact on our lives is something that was studied quite a bit actually two scientists one from
Stanford University in one from the university of Munich published a paper for the World Bank called the role of education quality in economic growth which looked out among other things the impact of your math proficiency so hi good you are in math and how it worked for the success you had in later life and what it showed was that the better you perform the math in
high school the more you would burn on in later life and the better country performed as a whole in mathematics the bedroom with it would perform as a whole economically so when we see this as individuals as as and that's a society we should want to be good in math and we as a society should want to turn out a lot of mathematically proficient school leavers
so why is it that when I talk about math education I look at you and you all go like this you look at this is all my god I hate math Matthew no it tortured me in school had that the homework in the tests I didn't like it was because math as a fundamental flaw in our school system is that because more and more students go
into our school system and want to learn math teacher or the number of teachers doesn't keep up we don't have enough teachers teach math to all of you so if we look back at our school time well it looked like this at the beginning you had one teacher thirty students were very motivated in this case are green and they look at math and they were curious
because I've never heard of a kit that is some curious that didn't want to understand something that didn't want to learn I've never heard of a kid they didn't want to have good grades the problem with math is that at some point you'll have a concept that is complex and that one of the students more understand it and when this problem arises you need a teacher
that housed the time you go to a student and explain what he made wrong and where you can go right and so that he can take the next step the problem is that these teachers don't have the time so one of these tunes is turning red right the problem here is that the student goes into this vicious cycle of not understanding getting frustrated not understanding getting
frustrated and so on and so forth you see where I'm going at some point this student will give up Hugh he have what he will have lost his curiosity his drive to understand mass his drive to learn math and over the years as mouth gets more more complex a class that look like this will look like this what more read student then green since more students
that as many of you here and as I as me to at some point didn't like math anymore right we all know this feeling and of course parents see this of course parents see this of through the lowering grades of their children so what is the response of one come responses let's get a private tutor right the great thing about privateering is that you have one
teacher on one child right it gets you had it provides you with the opportunity to understand on your own with your own teacher and my problem and private sharing is not that it doesn't work it's not that it's not effective it's not that it helps the kid doesn help the kid my problem with private tutoring is that it's crazy expensive what do I mean by crazy
expensive the private math shooting market by twenty twenty we're close to a hundred billion dollars meaning that families around the world will spend close to a hundred billion dollars on private shooters for their kids and that's a problem why is it a problem because for all the families that can afford that yeah families that can't families that can't give their children the opportunity they need to
get ahead in life and I don't think that's the way we should go as a society I don't think that the financial burden on families should bankrupt these families just because they want to give their children a chance thankfully we live in a time of technology and with the excel right to dissent of technology we have to if we have the opportunity to stay true to
the purpose of education so what is the purpose of education the purpose of education is not having one teacher and thirty students the purpose of education is to well educated children it's to teach them to think for themselves chichi them how to get ahead in life how to confront the challenges of life and that's what it's all about and when we look at technology when we
look at smartphones tablets and ask that are in the hand of every single student the world in every single teacher in the world we saw we've we suddenly have a platform where if I develop something in Germany every single one in the world can use my tool my help I'm offering to all of you that's the great thing about technology technology is our way to straight
stay true to this promise we make to the children to stay true to the thing we say when we say with this education you'll get ahead in life that's what technology gives us and my brother a fire then I %HESITATION work thirteen and fourteen at the time we recognize this when we solve this problem we saw this problem because of two things first off since I
was ten I gave private math lessons so on a daily basis I got more and more aware of the fact that a lot of students have problems in math and it wasn't that it was incredibly expensive for the families and the second thing is that I come from a family of mathematicians my father was a mathematician my grandfather and his brother were math professors my aunt
is a math teacher my cousin studied math my but then I studied math I think you get the gist we quite like math we love you know torturing our brains for some reason and the great thing about that for us is that we never close our minds to math we never said it's not important to learn math because it is for your life we never said
give up we always kept or mind open to the new challenges that with post through math and that's why we found it now forty two seven years ago together my brother my family now forty two is a technology that helps middle school high school and college students to understand math we've developed a technology that provides high quality individual an affordable education for now two point five
million since across the world two point five million students across the world are using our tool to get ahead in math now why is that why do they use mouth for you too well our approach was that when is June has a problem the best way to learn is to understand this problem so when he has a problem or homework that he doesn't understand become sore
app intereses problem and just like a private tutor we give him suggestions on how to solve the problem and then we give him a step by step solution of this problem explain it in a in detail so that he can understand it if you didn't understand a step well you can just click on the step and look at the substance of the substance of the substance
down to four plus one equals five firmware on everyone understands math we given definitions and we give him interactive graphs that illustrate abstract concepts in math beyond that we understand students we know where they go wrong when they go right weather problems lie and what they need to do next to overcome these challenges that's what mouth forty two and what we did was about we want
to provide a digital private friend and assistant to tutor that's always in your pocket I want to conclude by saying a couple of words about math education white so important we as a society simply can't afford it anymore to leave these children behind we as a society can't afford anymore to not give the opportunity to these children and for that we need to change the way
we think about math and how we think about math education we need to unlearn the way it was before are very rigid view of education and we need to see the benefits of technology the way the heck bait they help every single individual that they make everything affordable and we need not only to invest technologically medication but we need to invest psychologic from massive we've stopped
fearing mouth and we need to start fostering it we need to start being curious again about math and we need to stop saying it's okay it's not important math is not important to your life because it is even if you've never felt it it actually has a huge impact on your life the question I ask you today is who do you think will solve the energy
problems we have today in the face of global warming who do you think will cure aids and cancer who do you think will cure all the disease that get more and more resistant over time I know who will it will be the kids here in Paris in Mumbai in New York in Georgetown in Johannesburg they'll receive great mathematician thank you very much
