Elegance with substance

National parliaments around the world are advised to have their own national parliamentary enquiry into the education in mathematics. There is a failure in mathematics and its education that can be traced to a deep rooted culture in mathematics. Mathematicians are trained for abstract theory but when they teach then they meet with real life pupils and students. They solve their cognitive dissonance by embracing tradition for tradition only. Instead, didactics requires a mindset that is sensitive to empirical observation which is not what mathematicians are trained for. When mathematicians deal with empirical issues then problems arise in general. Other examples are voting theory for elections, models for environmental economics and growth, and the role of 'rocket scientists' in causing the stock market crash in 2008 (Mandelbrot & Taleb 2009). While school mathematics should be clear and didactically effective, a closer look shows that it is cumbersome and illogical. What is called mathematics thus is not really so. Pupils and students are psychologically tortured and withheld from proper mathematical insight and competence. The mathematics in this book is at highschool level.