Harvard Needs a Math Requirement

Our liberal arts education has a blind spot.

Harvard undergraduates are required to take a laundry list of classes spanning the liberal arts — with math as a notable exception. The point of a Harvard College education should be to learn how to think, and learning mathematical problem solving is an extremely effective way to sharpen the mind. We should make a foundation in mathematical reasoning a key part of the College’s curriculum.

Harvard enforces breadth in a few ways — General Education classes in four categories, distribution requirements in the Faculty of Arts and Science’s three divisions, and Expository Writing. Despite math’s conspicuous absence from these requirements, the College inexplicably promises that its undergraduates will “gain a broad foundation of critical thinking skills.”

We require Expository Writing because no matter where life takes our graduates, writing will almost certainly be an important skill. But why do we require General Education courses in Aesthetics and Culture; Histories, Societies, Individuals; Ethics and Civics; and Science and Technology in Society? For all their flaws, these courses are intended to “foster skills that generalize to the world beyond the classroom and give you the confidence to answer hard questions that fall beyond your own expertise.”

After all, that is the point of a liberal arts education. Most Harvard students will use very little of what they learn as undergraduates in the day-to-day of their future careers. We want our graduates to be well-educated — not just so they can sound posh at cocktail parties, but also because the process of reading, learning, and writing hones our critical thinking skills and sharpens our minds.

But this particular benefit of education is certainly not restricted to the humanities and social sciences. In fact, one of the best grinding stones for the brain is currently missing from Harvard’s requirements: mathematics.

Studying math has given me far more than knowledge of complex analysis or algebraic geometry. Rather, the act of learning math has made me smarter — a cliché I myself might have scoffed at four years ago, but which nevertheless rings true.

I’ve spent countless hours at a blackboard, collaborating with friends and getting stumped on difficult proofs. That process has made my mind sharper to a level that no other experience in my life has matched. Math teaches you how to break down a seemingly intractable, unapproachable problem into manageable parts, and then how to convert your intuition into formal arguments.

Harvard gestures at “math” via the Quantitative Reasoning with Data requirement, which requires students to take a class on data analysis. Don’t get me wrong: Statistical reasoning is important, especially in our increasingly data-filled world. But to even begin to round out the purported “breadth” of a Harvard education, the College needs a true math requirement.

Concretely, consider Mathematics 101: “Sets, Groups, and Real Analysis.” To the non-math concentrator, perhaps those words sound somewhat scary. But dive one level deeper: The course is an introduction to “abstract mathematical thought and proof techniques.” The point arguably is not the actual content you learn; it is the mathematical intuition, rigor, and problem-solving you pick up along the way.

I am not advocating for making Math 101 mandatory — I haven’t taken it, and I am not intimately familiar with its content, time commitment, or difficulty. Nor do I wish to litigate exactly which courses should satisfy my proposed math requirement. I certainly do not seek to require that every Harvard student dive into any sort of deep mathematical theory.

Instead, think of it this way: The point of Harvard’s myriad expository writing course topics is not to read about an esoteric subject, but rather to sharpen the lifelong skill of writing. Likewise, every Harvard graduate should at some point be introduced to the style of reasoning one learns in a math class.

As another example, consider Quantitative Reasoning 28: “The Magic of Numbers,” a course offered at Harvard decades ago — and catered to a non-math audience.

Joseph D. Harris ’72, a professor of mathematics who co-taught the course, saw it as “a sort of ‘mathematics appreciation’ course, to be taken in the same spirit as a music appreciation course.” As he told The Crimson in 1999, “This is not a practical, pre-professional course, and we are not going to expect the students to master complicated mathematical techniques any more than you’d expect the students in a music appreciation course to learn to write a symphony.”

From wrangling “big data” to using artificial intelligence, specific pre-professional skills come and go. Today, our requirements miss a true recognition of the timeless value of fundamentals — like mathematics itself.

Instead, the “breadth” of the College’s liberal arts education has a notable humanities tilt. We require our STEM concentrators to learn to reflect on and write critically about literature and history, but we lack the symmetric expectation for our humanities students.

With this imbalance, Harvard does its students a disservice. We deny those who would otherwise avoid the upper floors of Zimmer Hall the joy of discovering how the act of learning mathematics can sharpen their thinking — far from the blackboard.

Rohan Nambiar ’27, an Associate Editorial Editor, is a double concentrator in Mathematics and Economics in Leverett House. He was previously a course assistant for Mathematics 55A: “Studies in Algebra and Group Theory” and Mathematics 55B: “Studies in Real and Complex Analysis” and is currently a course assistant for Mathematics 213A: “Advanced Complex Analysis.”