Digital Math Tutor

The evolution of math over the last 50 years?

Understanding of math never moves backwards, only forwards. In that
respect, it is unique amongst the sciences. Once a math theorem is proven, it is never disproven.

Not so with science. Newton's laws of physics stood for 250 years until
Einstein came along and proved them incorrect. So scientific theory changed and so it will go.

Math is different. The Pythagorean theorem will be true a million years
from now. It will never be disproven.

We will move forward, sometimes slowly, sometimes more rapidly, but we will never move backwards in math.

The most significant thing that changes with time is the way we teach or learn math. Technology has made math much easier to learn. When I went to college, there were no calculators, only slide rules. It wasn't easy to see graphical depictions of functions. Without the ability to see functions graphically, it was much harder to learn calculus, 3-D vectors, etc. Now 3-D vectors are taught to seniors in high school as opposed to
graduate school in college back in 1970. That's largely due to the technology, not any fundamental changes in math.

Also, the internet has brought us online teaching and tutoring, with online
classes from MIT and Harvard professors, not to mention Khan Academy's 40 thousand educational videos.

While the upsides of technology are huge, there are some downsides to the tech revolution. Virtually everyone that grew up in the post-calculator
generation, (post 1970), got a different elementary math education than those pre-1970. The emphasis switched from arithmetic skills to more complex math concepts, but the result today, is that there is a severe shortage of arithmetic skills in today's high school math
students. This almost certainly is due to the ubiquitousness of the calculator, and it allows many students to get to high school without arithmetic skills.

As long as we have calculators available, this might seem acceptable, but, I believe it is the #1 fundamental cause of poor performance in algebra, geometry, trig, and pre-calculus.