In a TED talk watched by over a million people, Wolfram (2010) proposes that working on mathematics has four stages:
1. Posing a question
2. Going from the real world to a mathematical model
3. Performing a calculation
4. Going from the model back to the real world, to see if the original question was answered
The first stage involves asking a good question of some data or a situation—the first mathematical act that is needed in the workplace. The fastest-growing job in the United States is that of data analyst—someone who looks at the “big data” that all companies now have and asks important questions of the data. The second stage Wolfram describes is setting up a model to answer the question; the third is performing a calculation, and the fourth is turning the model back to the world to see whether the question is answered. Wolfram points out that 80% of school mathematics is spent on stage 3—performing a calculation by hand—when that is the one stage that employers do not need workers to be able to do, as it is performed by a calculator or computer. Instead, Wolfram proposes that we have students working on stages 1, 2, and 4 for much more of their time in mathematics classes.
What employers need, he argues, is people who can ask good questions, set up models, analyze results, and interpret mathematical answers. It used to be that employers needed people to calculate; they no longer need this. What they need is people to think and reason.
