Brian Conrad takes down the CMF

I’ve written before on the California Math Framework, but must admit that I have only read parts of this 900+ page document. Brian Conrad (Professor of Mathematics and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Stanford) has read the entire thing, and chased down many citations, reading the original papers. The results are not pretty. In a great many cases, the cited papers do not come close to justifying the claims that the CMF makes about them; sometimes they even come to the opposite conclusions. See the full analysis on this website:

https://sites.google.com/view/publiccommentsonthecmf/

Unrelated announcement: The Simons Institute for Theoretical Computer Science will have a 10th-anniversary symposium on May 25-27. The program looks awesome! I plan to be there in person and hope to catch up with many friends and colleagues I haven’t seen for a long time.

One thought on “Brian Conrad takes down the CMF

  1. Brian Conrad’s two documents are excellent. Still, it is very disappointing that there was no attempt to explicitly include some Discrete Mathematics topics in the curriculum. It is one of the few areas where students can be exposed to interesting problems of varying levels of difficulty that can be interesting, and use mathematical reasoning, as opposed to memorization and rote processes.

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