November 17, 2006, Hour Two: The Family that Couldn't Sleep / The Artist and the Mathematician Starting in the 1930s, Nicolas Bourbaki published dozens of papers, becoming a famous mathematician. There was just one problem: he didn't exist. Join Ira in this hour on Science Friday for a conversation with Amir Aczel about the genius mathematician who never existed.

The really interesting thing about this Science Friday podcast is not the subject matter itself (although it's no boring either) but a little throwaway line by Aczel when he says that the reason French mathematics of the 1920s and 30s wasn't very good (meaning there weren't many world-class mathematicians) was the fact that the main introductory textbook was boring and hard to read. There is also a comment on p. 14 of the book: "in addition to the fact that the teaching at these small schools in wartime France was not good, the textbooks were inadequate." - thanks to Amazon.

This brings up the image of a number of stories of confused students who then decide not to (or do not decide to) pursue mathematics further. This is a very typical image employed in much of educational policy to justify particular action in service of global change. But there really is no good reason to claim that this is an apt image to apply (although it may be the most natural one - or the one most readily integrated with the mental spaces). First, for it to be useful, the opposite would also have to be true - i.e. that engaging and easy-to-understand texts would leave to more mathematicians. This clearly isn’t the case - because there are many who use the opposite scenario. Students who study easy math are never challenged enough to become good. (A friend of mine who is a mathematician in the US in a department full of non-Americans blames many of the failures of US domestic mathematics on the ‘permissive’ nature of the American approach to education.)

The problem for policy is that plausible stories can be told with either of these rich-image scenarios. But neither of them has a great explanatory let alone predictive value. I suspect that a good anthropology of education might provide a good explanation and the complexity of the situation will preclude any effective predictive explanation. But anthropology and ethnography have in general proved to be very difficult to translate into policy.