I like to think of math as the new civics. To be a good citizen in the future, you will increasingly need to be literate in math. Everyone is capable of it. If you consider the incredible things the human brain can learn about, facial recognition and social complexity, math is a breeze. We are just not teaching it very well.

I saw the consequences of this failure while working in politics. Before I founded my company, Knewton, I was on the Kerry campaign doing opposition research. And there I learned pretty quickly that when a story is not in your favor and it involves numbers, you just release a bunch of boring stuff on Friday afternoon; you bury people in numbers, and every reporter says, “I can’t write about this,” and it just goes away. Those numbers contain the most important things. That’s what I mean when I say math is the new civics.

Data Science is here to stay and it’s changing the world. In thirty years, the world will be completely driven by data science in a way that we can’t even imagine today. Math is becoming ever more important, just as we in the Western world are giving up on it. Instead of teaching an intuitive approach to math, we’re turning schools into test paper centers. Our society instructs teachers to prepare kids for rapid-fire multiple-choice questions. Big surprise that the kid hates math, then.