Editor's letter: Did you hate algebra?

last updated 8 January 2015

Maybe it was the distractions of the early ’70s, or perhaps just my clouded adolescent mind, but in high school I hated algebra. All those X’s and Y’s; it was as dry as dust, so removed from the foment of life outside Saint Dominic High School. I did my academic duty, however, and come June I had eked out a B and moved on to geometry. But I harbored a secret shame about not being a “math person” until I read Andrew Hacker’s provocative essay in The New York Times, in which he questions whether algebra is necessary for most students (see News: Talking points). Just seeing the equation he chose to close his argument—(x² + y²)² = (x² - y²)² + (2xy)²—gave me an anxious flashback.

So I took an informal survey of my siblings, since we all took algebra at the same high school. Did you hate it, too? Did it prove useful? My older brother, Walter, a physicist, looked at me like I was insane. “In physics, all equations are expressed in algebraic terms,” he said with a sigh. My younger brother, Jerry, an entrepreneur, said he used algebraic formulas in “forecasting and gauging profitability.” My sister, Rita, took three higher-math courses to get her psychology degree, and though she hasn’t used equations in her career, she voiced no regrets. So I was in a minority in my family, but as Hacker’s research suggests, for the majority of adults, higher math “is more feared or revered than understood.” For me, at least, algebraic aversion is no handicap. If faced with a computation I can’t perform, I know the right digits: the phone numbers of my siblings.