Aug 26, 2026 · 17 min · 8 segments
Ted Dintersmith, author of Aftermath: The Life-Changing Math that Schools Won't Teach You, argues that much of what we learn in math can be outsourced to machines. That frees people to understand the…
Earlier when you were talking informally about the kids trying to estimate the number of, what was it? Beans or something in a jar.
... fascinated they were by it, and I love that because it's an open-ended problem, and there's no, "Here's the formula, you plug it in."
Well, the micro and macro point here, I was at a farmers market with my wife.
Not necessarily my first choice of what to do on a Saturday morning, but definitely hers, and so I'm, I'll go with her.
And we're at this farmers market, and somebody has a table with a glass jar full of pasta shells with, "Guess how many pasta shells are in the jar?" And there's this long line of kids waiting to put their guess in.
And I'd interview them, and I'd say, "So tell me how you're gonna make your guess." And no two approaches were the same.
And yet, you know, one of the things that got me going on this is it was an interview with the head at the time, the head of the Gates Foundation, who was making very large grants to improve math scores in high school.
And the interview quoted him as saying, "Math is unique among all disciplines because in math there is always one right answer." And in the opening of my book, I lay out...
I just sort of put a hypothetical email inbox with all these things that are math related that beg for creative approaches.
And, and my point in the book, and I make it here, is when the people making the large grants, the people making the policy decisions, don't understand math- We're in trouble.
Earlier when you were talking informally about the kids trying to estimate the number of, what was it? Beans or something in a jar.
... fascinated they were by it, and I love that because it's an open-ended problem, and there's no, "Here's the formula, you plug it in."
Well, the micro and macro point here, I was at a farmers market with my wife.
Not necessarily my first choice of what to do on a Saturday morning, but definitely hers, and so I'm, I'll go with her.
And we're at this farmers market, and somebody has a table with a glass jar full of pasta shells with, "Guess how many pasta shells are in the jar?" And there's this long line of kids waiting to put their guess in.
And I'd interview them, and I'd say, "So tell me how you're gonna make your guess." And no two approaches were the same.
And yet, you know, one of the things that got me going on this is it was an interview with the head at the time, the head of the Gates Foundation, who was making very large grants to improve math scores in high school.
And the interview quoted him as saying, "Math is unique among all disciplines because in math there is always one right answer." And in the opening of my book, I lay out...
I just sort of put a hypothetical email inbox with all these things that are math related that beg for creative approaches.
And, and my point in the book, and I make it here, is when the people making the large grants, the people making the policy decisions, don't understand math- We're in trouble.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
