Woke Mathematics in Education- Part 1

While the last few years have witnessed growing "fatigue" regarding woke and DEI policies, they are still prominent fixtures in our society, especially (and unfortunately) in our STEM fields.

Absent analytical techniques painstakingly discovered in mathematics over millennia, modern science and engineering could not exist. Formulaic and graphical structures enable physicists and chemists to recognize and quantify causality, which engineers can exploit to usher new technological marvels through invention with remarkable consistency. But contrary to the demands of Woke apologists, such derivations reveal no obeisance to emotional appeals.

Woke Education

For over a decade, various diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) advocates have decried professions in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) as representative of oppression. By thoroughly infiltrating academia through demands for grievance protest, the DEI Woke have completely corrupted the undisciplined humanities, and have shifted their attention towards indoctrination in STEM, primarily in the field of mathematics.

Why STEM? Because most participants in society acknowledge the contributions made by its practitioners and understand the discipline needed to engage in such mentally demanding endeavors. DEI seeks to hijack the recognition and compensation associated with these difficult fields by condemning them as inherently unfair for their emphasis on exactitude, but which are immune to political manipulation. The Woke seem unable to acknowledge that STEM entails not merely difficulty in learning, but also in teaching. Typical expression of concepts in STEM involves symbols, diagrams and graphical relations, together with select terms that have subtle but definitive meanings.

Both conservative and progressive commentators object to the term “Woke” as being vague. In the context of this argument, Woke operates as a pejorative catchall label that insinuates fostering of social discord by instigating tribal envy. In particular, the champions of Woke invoke the banner of social injustice based on disparity of results. They insist that due to the complete malleability of humans, anyone unable to become an astrophysicist or brain surgeon, despite a purported desire, has been unjustly impeded. Such intellectual lunacy has extended into denial of gamete-based biology as socially derived textual constructions to dilute implicit cultural connotations from dimorphism.

In the Woke’s wake, public “education” eschews mathematics instruction and instead prefers political agitation for the purpose of implementing preferential treatment that is collectively based on tribal identity, rather than individual merit in ability or personal efforts of improvement. This divide-and-conquer strategy employs both ethnic envy for quota tokenism and cultic animosity against prosperous neighbors.

Phases of Matter

To better explain this circumstance in more practical terms, we need familiar analogs. We recognize things in our environs as having material composition with definable characteristics at room temperature and sea-level pressure. Examples of these are air as a gas with variable volume and conformable shape, water as a liquid having a definitive volume and conformable shape, and gold as a solid being rigid in both volume and shape.

In elementary school, we were taught about the three phases of matter: solid, liquid and gas. This simplified instruction neglected ionized plasma, of course, as direct exposure to it would be lethal. College thermodynamics explains that physical phases shifted along constant lines of pressure, temperature and specific volume, as depicted in the phase diagram below. Depending on location within that graph, a pure substance can straddle within a pair of phases together. For water, the critical state for all three phases coincides at 12.8 pounds-force-per-square-foot pressure and 32.0 degrees Fahrenheit temperature.

Bose Gas

The advent of modern physics sought to discover the fundamental constituents of matter, eventually confirming the ancient atomic theory. Subsequently, researchers found that atoms comprised sub-atomic particles, each having their own inertial mass and electric charge. Many elementary particles are categorized as fermions (in honor of Enrico Fermi) having angular momentum quantified as half-integer spin values such that they cannot mutually occupy the same location. These include protons, neutrons and electrons, for example.

Other particles by contrast – such as photons – have integer-spin values and can be squeezed together. Called bosons, after Satyendra Bose who postulated an ideal gas of photons just over a century ago. Albert Einstein extended such composition to massive particles (with translation), contemplated as yet another rarely encountered state of matter – Bose-Einstein condensate, or BEC. For example, deuterium nuclei can exhibit this behavior. However, the necessarily low temperatures presented technical obstacles until 1995 when BECs were separately created using rubidium and sodium.

To form a BEC, temperature must lower to micro-kelvin (µK) absolute scales. For comparison, the sun’s photosphere radiates at 4,400K, our bodies metabolize at 310K, and the cosmos background is 2.7K. Achieving conditions for BEC formation requires cooling five or six orders of magnitude from the near vacuum of outer space. Needless to say, this presents serious challenge for physicists and engineers to transfer thermal energy so effectively (no doubt, our dear reader wonders…what’s the point of all this?)

Last year, a Belgian named Laurent Simons published a dissertation that characterizes polaron disturbance in a Bose gas using Hamiltonian energy operators, preceded by a related co-authored article. Three years prior, he completed his thesis modeling a BEC to simulate Hawking radiation (i.e., particle-antiparticle creation along a black hole horizon) and the Casimir effect (i.e., quantum virtual pressure against parallel plates in a vacuum). His studies continue in medicine and artificial intelligence. The most remarkable aspect to the public notes that Simons was only fifteen years old at the time of his doctoral defense.

Simons isn’t the only contemporary prodigy. Quanta has published articles on Daniel Larsen and Hannah Cairo, both Americans whose contributions to mathematics were presented at the age of seventeen. Larsen submitted a paper regarding Carmichael numbers, which constitute non-prime integers that satisfy b^N – b being divisible by N for all values of b. Cairo released a paper disproving the four-decades-old Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture related to functions constructed from waves.

Lost Opportunities

Admittedly, most of us plebes are not that clever or devoted to such abstract study. As a pedestrian example, I personally assembled scale model aircraft while attending high school. So what’s the point of such mundane recollections from mediocre adolescence? Well, the devolution of education has produced entering college students that require remedial arithmetic, as admitted by University of California San Diego and further narrated by Kelsey Piper. The educational malpractice within high school’s cripples young men and women from pursuing STEM careers by squandering their formative years with institutional non-instruction.

And more capable students remain trapped, precluded from grade skipping to accelerate their progress despite (or perhaps due to) their benefit. The Woke’s “blank slate” model assumes universal equality in mental acuity, and when performance evidence refutes such delusions, schools impose homogenous mediocrity. The mental acumen of precocious adolescents who rise above the crowd demonstrates what can be achieved by a gifted few (such as Simons, Larsen and Cairo). But unleashing such talents more broadly necessitates releasing pupils from what we deign to call “schools” that in reality serve as childhood prisons. Among Calvin & Hobbes cartoons, one epitomizes Calvin’s fantasy of obliterating those stifling grounds of his torment.

Stay tuned. Part 2 of this article will explore the deficiencies in current efforts to deflect attention from mathematics study towards political agitation.

Photo Credits- Pinterest, X, Quizlet, and Reddit.