A Mind for Numbers

A Mathophobe Becomes an Engineer

Barbara Oakley flunked her way through high school math and science. Not just struggled — flunked. As a kid she couldn't read a clock face. She didn't know which button on the family television was the power button. By the time she was finishing high school she had decided, with the stubborn clarity that thirteen-year-olds reserve for self-diagnosis, that she was "technically, scientifically, and mathematically incapable." She majored in the opposite: Slavic languages, with Russian fluent enough that native speakers mistook her for one of their own.

Then she joined the United States Army Signal Corps and discovered that the officers who could actually fix radios, switching systems, and electronics were the ones everyone needed. She, the language major, finished at the bottom of her class in electronics. She watched the problem-solvers get promoted past her. So at twenty-six, on the GI Bill, she sat down to start over. She began with remedial trigonometry. The first semesters were what she calls "frightening frustration." Eventually she earned a bachelor's in electrical engineering, a master's in electrical and computer engineering, and a Ph.D. in systems engineering. "By the time I reached my doctoral studies," she writes, "I was breezing by with perfect grades." She is now a professor of engineering and an editor of the journal of bioengineering.

This is the book's foundational claim and its proof of concept in the same person: brains can be retrained. Not by working harder in the same broken way you have always worked, but by understanding what your brain is actually doing when it learns — and then matching your habits to that machinery. Oakley spent years talking to leading professors across math, physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, psychology, and neuroscience, and she noticed something. They all used the same set of underlying techniques. Most of them had stumbled into those techniques the hard way, treating the discovery as a private initiation rite. Her book exists to make those techniques accessible without the initiation.