Do the ‘Math Wars’ Really Exist?

Barry Garelick, via a kind email

The New York Times recently published a piece called “The Faulty Logic of the Math Wars” by W. Stephen Wilson (a math professor at Johns Hopkins University) and Alice Crary. While the article itself is worth reading, I found the reaction of the readers to be equally fascinating. They revealed the ideological divide that defines this “war”. I was reminded of Tom Wolfe’s famous description of the reaction of the New Yorker literati to his 1965 article in the New York Herald Tribune that criticized the culture of The New Yorker magazine: “They screamed like weenies over a wood fire.”