'A Mathematician's Lament' by Paul Lockhart; 'The Rights of Spring' by David Kennedy; and 'Towards Another Summer' by Janet Frame

A Mathematician's

Lament

How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form

Paul Lockhart

Bellevue Literary Press: 192 pp., $12.95 paper

This gorgeous essay, a critique of K-12 math as it is taught in our schools, was first written in 2002 and circulated on the Internet for years before Keith Devlin, a professor at Stanford University, encouraged Paul Lockhart, a professor of mathematics, to expand it for a larger audience. Lockhart begins with the assertion that math is an art, not a "tool for science and technology" and that there is "nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics. It is every bit as mind-lowing as cosmology or physics (mathematicians conceived of black holes long before astronomers actually found any), and allows more freedom of expression than poetry, art, or music."

There is, Lockhart repeats throughout this essay, more fantasy than fact in mathematics. Current teaching removes the creative process altogether and replaces it with formulas to be memorized. The math curriculum doesn't need reforming, he argues, it needs to be scrapped. It is rigid, based on a false sequence of steps and, most abhorrently, is treated like a race. Lockhart is passionate, contagiously so. "Is that great or what?" he writes, after explaining how a mathematical idea should be presented. "I only wish I could see your face -- to see if your eyes light up, and to make sure that you get the joke so to speak. Mathematics is fundamentally an act of communication, and I want to know if my idea got through. (If tears aren't streaming down your face, maybe you should read it again.)"

The Rights of Spring

A Memoir of Innocence Abroad

David Kennedy

Princeton University Press: 105 pp., $15.95 paper

In 1985, David Kennedy, professor of international law at Brown and Harvard, traveled with a doctor and a writer to two prisons in Uruguay to visit four political prisoners in an effort to argue for their release in a Montevideo court. Through the lens of that experience, Kennedy writes about the human rights movement. At the time, he writes, there was no room for doubts, no way to voice the many ambiguities involved. Kennedy tells the story of the prisoners and the torture they endured, but he is clearly weary of the way these stories are told to draw attention to atrocities and inspire action.