Worst Mathematics Article  
 Ever Written 
 

Dan Kennedy, "A Tale of Two CD's", American Mathematical Monthly, August-September 1994, pages 603-608.

Commentary. What are the characteristics of the "Worst Mathematics Article"?

  1. Articles with incorrect mathematics and with mistakes are common. This article avoids the problem by including no true mathematical content at all, so mistakes don't come up for discussion.

  2. The title gives no indication of the actual subject matter. In fact, the title and the first 50 percent of the article have nothing to do with mathematics. The first half serves as a sort of "parable" (the author's term) for the subject matter of the second half.

  3. Surprisingly, the second half of the article (its true content) does have a premise, what one could call a contention:

    The article gives almost no support for this premise. No reasons, almost no examples or stories of experiences, no statistics, no references, nothing worthwhile at all! I am personally suspicious of this premise, but I could be persuaded, so I would like to have seen some evidence of the utility of graphing calculators in a calculus course. No help from this article. (He does talk about students discovering results on their own. What results? And how were they discovered?)

  4. The author is the ultimate narcissist, using the word "I" over 100 times, and constantly referring to his own experiences with compact discs. He makes little mention of his own experiences with the use of graphing calculators to teach calculus.

  5. The author writes the most outrageous breezy trash throughout his article. The supreme example of his style comes in his discussion of Newton:

    Did you ever wonder what Newton would say if he could come back today and watch a traditional calculus class in action--if you could call it "action"? Do you suppose he would be flattered to see that, 300 years after his death, we were all teaching his same results to our students? I don't want to put words into the old Lion's mouth, but knowing that Newton once wrote to Robert Hooke, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulder [sic] of giants," I dare say that he might pick up a graphing calculator, stare at it for several minutes with amazement, then say something like this: "The creators of this magic are giants. Is there nobody here who will stand on their shoulders?

  6. The author celebrates his drinking problems, and refers twice to Hugh Hefner, all part of his "mathematics" article.

  7. At the end, the author is still raving about showing a graphing calculator to Newton if he "does come back to visit us".