What’s so great about Maths?

This isn’t a rhetorical question, but rather the title of the first programme in the new Radio 4 series ‘What’s So Great About…’, hosted by comedian and actor Lenny Henry, a self-confessed maths dunce.

The Radio 4 programme, broadcast last weekend, features Lenny Henry talking to the likes of Carol Vorderman and Neurologist Brian Butterworth in an effort to get the root of our apparent national distaste for numbers.

In Henry’s case his distaste for, or discomfort with, maths probably has its origins in an uncaring teacher and the implication that he was intellectually inferior for his problems with the subject.

But part of the problem, as Vorderman notes in the programme, is a seeming comfort with innumeracy and a willingness to admit it to others. This attitude doesn’t seem to prevail in other developed nations, but it’s hard to put your finger on why this might be a particularly British tendency.

The great C.P. Snow lamented something parallel to this half a century ago with his famous ‘Two Cultures’ lecture on the gulf between the arts and the sciences. He famously commented:

Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?

Maybe the answer to this cultural gap, and our more personal problems with numbers is twofold – first, einstate a sense of pride in maths; after all, maths underpinned the engineering successes of the Victorian age and the advances of British scientists in the 20th Century.

Second, rediscover the joy of numbers, just as the wonderful TV mathematician Johnny Ball did with Think of a Number. This requires not that we teach maths in trivial or flippant ways – rigour is still vital – but that we try hard to give students the sense that they can play with numbers, and see the patterns that appear in everything from card games to particle physics.

And maybe the first step is a shot of top-flight online maths tutoring. We can only hope!

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