Harvard recently hosted an Undergraduate Math Modernization Summit on the challenge of reinventing undergraduate mathematics education for the AI era. How to move past a curriculum still rooted in the 1950s and 1960s? In an article in the Harvard Gazette, Harvard’s Director of Introductory Math says “Math educators must demonstrate that quantitative reasoning is an essential skill for many disciplines”.

I am happy with those words “quantitative reasoning”, but I am not sure all mathematicians would be. Mathematics, after all, is not just about numbers. Mathematicians like to speak of our subject more grandly as the search for patterns or structures. Quantitative reasoning? Isn’t that something from another era?

[11 June 2026]