We hear a lot of design manifestos around here. But Bret Victor ‘s stuck out: He wants to kill math . He’s no Luddite, though — he thinks mathematics is one of the most powerful, transcendent ways humans have for understanding and changing the world. What he wants to kill is math’s interface: opaque, abstract, unfamiliar, hard. “The power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols,” he writes. Now he’s created a prototype iPad interface that turns differential equations into something that doesn’t feel math-ey at all: visual, intuitive, and touchable.

Equations and squiggly symbols aren’t math at all: They’re merely our interface.

Victor’s key insight is that what we think of as “math” — equations, numerals, operators, variables, those squiggly symbols filling up millions of blackboards and textbooks — isn’t math at all: it’s merely the interface. And it sucks. “I hate symbolic abstraction, [because] I think it’s a barrier to creativity,” he tells Co.Design. “So I don’t hate math per se; I hate its current representations. Have you ever tried multiplying roman numerals? It’s incredibly, ridiculously difficult. That’s why, before the 14th century, everyone thought that multiplication was an incredibly difficult concept, and only for the mathematical elite. Then arabic numerals came along, with their nice place values, and we discovered that even seven-year-olds can handle multiplication just fine. There was nothing difficult about the concept of multiplication — the problem was that numbers, at the time, had a bad user interface.”

It may not surprise you, after reading that, to hear that Victor used to be an interface designer at Apple — a company whose founding mission could be restated as “kill computers.” Of course Jobs and Co. didn’t hate computers — they just hated the technical, limiting abstractions involved in using them. But Victor left Apple because he has “zero interest in helping people look through photos and listen to music,” he says. As an interface designer, he wanted to hunt (and “kill”) bigger game — the kinds of problems that artists and scientists deal with. “I saw Ali Mazalek’s ‘Pathways’ project, which was an attempt to design a ‘tangible interface’ for visualizing and exploring biochemical pathways,” he says, “Their design was very problematic, and the biology researcher ‘clients’ were not very enthusiastic about it. But seeing the problem gave me some ideas, and I whipped up a little prototype basically as a way of teaching them how to think about this sort of UI design.”

That prototype eventually grew into the interface shown in the video clip at the top of this article. Although it can run on an iPad, Victor isn’t planning on releasing “anything resembling the design shown” as an app. “The prototype was intended to teach and inspire tool designers, so that’s the meta-audience.” It’s a variation on the old saw: give a man a fish, and he eats for a day, but teach him to fish, and he eats for a lifetime. If Victor is going to “kill math,” a single specific app won’t do it — but a set of inspiring examples just might, if they inspire others to think about how they can “kill math” themselves.