Who knows exactly what a new poll says about mathematics in America, but the reactions to a recent poll on the topic are a little alarming.
When CivicScience, a Pittsburgh-based market research firm, polled more than 3,200 Americans on the issue of mathematics instruction last week, 56% of the respondents said Arabic numerals should not be taught in American schools; 29% said it should be part of the curriculum, while 16% offered no opinion.
John Dick@jdcivicscience
Ladies and Gentlemen: The saddest and funniest testament to American bigotry we’ve ever seen in our data.
Did they realize we’ve been using Arabic numerals for just about everything under the sun since the founding fathers […]
Though it has nothing to do with the primary message of this article (which is more about the ignorance of the American population and less about its biases), what I was taught in my Arabic language training is that we in the West use numerals developed by Arabs, while Arabic uses numerals developed in India. This is actually more or less true. While the base-10 reckoning system was developed in India, the actual numerals we now use appear to have been developed in the Maghreb by Arabs. No doubt there was some Indian influence (there are some similarities between the numerals that Arabic-speakers use today and those that Westerners use), we inherited our numeric notation from the Arabs while, ironically, the Arabs have inherited theirs from the Indians. This was a source of amusement for my Iraq- and Lebanon-born language instructors.