A friend of mine used Mathematica in a high school math classroom. I've also met some of his former students who think he was their best teacher.
Something that occurs to me is that most of us have a poor grasp of why we even teach school math: It's treated as some kind of tournament to get into college, or a general IQ building exercise, or even a form of obedience training. The math that is "real" to them is just what they happened to learn, the way they learned it. But most people admit that they forgot all of their math immediately upon finishing school.
And school math isn't even how "math people" do math. I still enjoy doing a pencil and paper derivation for fun sometimes, but mostly I do math at a computer. The world does math in Excel.
I'm not too worried about Mathematica being proprietary. Like with programming, if you learn one language, you can usually learn another in a jiffy.
Something that occurs to me is that most of us have a poor grasp of why we even teach school math: It's treated as some kind of tournament to get into college, or a general IQ building exercise, or even a form of obedience training. The math that is "real" to them is just what they happened to learn, the way they learned it. But most people admit that they forgot all of their math immediately upon finishing school.
And school math isn't even how "math people" do math. I still enjoy doing a pencil and paper derivation for fun sometimes, but mostly I do math at a computer. The world does math in Excel.
I'm not too worried about Mathematica being proprietary. Like with programming, if you learn one language, you can usually learn another in a jiffy.