Doodling infinity

Remember Larry Summers? After he helped set the economy on its collision course with deregulation, he became president of Harvard and made a speech suggesting that women’s brains aren’t good for math and science.

The video above, by self-styled “recreational mathemusician” Vi Hart, gives the lie to all that pretty nicely.

In a TED talk I watched recently, Conrad Wolfram, who with his brother Stephen runs the research lab that created WolframAlpha, advocates making mathematics education interesting for students by taking out the calculation. Use computers to do the heavy lifting, he says, and let kids chase interesting questions instead. But as Vi hart shows, there’s a lot of great non-computational math to be done without computers as well. A simple pencil and pad of paper will suffice.

[via Neatorama]