The Power of Math for the Collective Good

Math skills taught in today’s classrooms have the potential to solve problems and change our future. From models used to predict public health outcomes to data that drive apportionment of legislative seats, the importance of using math for the collective good needs to inform our debates about math content, instruction, and assessment. 

Speakers and attendees of Just Equations’ most recent conference, The Mathematics of Opportunity: Beyond Limits, created a shared blueprint for a future in which more students are steeped in the analytical skills needed to understand the data that already impact and influence nearly every corner of our lives.

That starts with discerning whether data are used to foster change or to distract and distort, said keynote speaker Safiya Umoja Noble, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and the director of the UCLA DataX initiative.

Today’s students need to learn math not just in math class, but in the context of multiple disciplines. Such an approach ensures they have the skills to solve real-world problems and imbues their education with relevance that gives them a sense of belonging and ownership. 

“The levels of critical thinking that we need and that are required in an increasingly complex, data[-driven] society mean we have to have a particular type of deep grounding and knowledge of society, of history, of the humanities, of social sciences in order to make sense of whether the kinds of systems that we’re engaging with are feeding us back propaganda or feeding us back things that are nonsensical,” Noble said during her address, “Data and Disinformation: Elevating Digital Justice in an Unjust World.”

Noble’s points were amplified by speakers in our keynote dialogue, “Shifting the Paradigm: Math for the Collective Good.” “I would love to be able to see more teachers … be able to build bridges to different school districts and their communities, or beyond, to really help expose students to the different types of math to be able to help them gain access to those critical skills to … pursue a degree wherever they decide to go,” Denise A. Smith, deputy director of higher education policy and a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, said during the session. 

“I think creating those types of pipeline programs and being able to have early exposure is what’s going to be critical for the next generation.”

Harvard University professor Mary T. Bassett, a physician who directs the school’s center for health and human rights, found herself at the intersections of math, data, and public health during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Then the commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Bassett was tasked with tracking and predicting the spread of COVID-19 in the city and communicating that data to the public to “flatten the curve.” 

“My days began with looking at numbers and then deciding how to use them,” she said. “Simple mathematical concepts—they didn’t involve calculus or anything, just arithmetic—were ones that I had to try and reinforce with the public.”

As lines for testing spread around city blocks, Bassett was giving press conferences to explain how the spread of infection was exponential, not linear.

“It involved me literally standing there and saying, ‘It goes two, four, six, eight, 32, 64,128, 256, and then it’s getting beyond the math that I learned in elementary school,’ ”she said. “So a lot of public health depends on numbers that really reflect just the magnitude of the impact on the population.”

Lessons about math and the public good can be introduced as early as elementary school, said Ismar Volić, the director and co-founder of the Institute for Mathematics and Democracy at Wellesley College. But rigorous high school and college course options that allow students to learn and apply math to the world around them is what will drive policy updates and social change. 

“A revelation for me is when I started teaching this class, math and democracy, about five years ago, and then I suddenly started meeting these students who would not ever set foot in the math department otherwise,” he said. “I had … students from 14 different majors. So the discussion was so rich. The points of view were so rich.”

Volić said the class includes calculus and statistics, but it inevitably becomes so much more than numbers, delving into economics, data science, and political science.

“At the end of the course, these students are mad that no one has taught them these things before. That the voting method we use is terrible, that gerrymandering is awful … the way we distribute power is bad. And they had mathematicians’ arguments to back this up,” he said. “They felt empowered because mathematics empowers you when you own it, and they just wanted to get out there and change the world.”