Mathematics and Statistics - OU Community Online

Jeffrey Johnson, Robin Wilson and June Barrow-Green write about how the OU course TM190 The Story of Maths makes the subject exciting and accessible.

It is a sad reflection on our schooling that many people hate maths, or at best avoid it whenever they can, which is a pity because it is one of the cultural and aesthetic glories of humanity. Without maths there’s no architecture, no commerce, no accurate maps or time-keeping; therefore no navigation or aviation, no electricity or cars – the list of maths-dependent disciplines is endless. Mathematics pervades every aspect of our lives: every time we switch on the television, plug in a computer or drive a car, pay with a credit card, and travel on a plane, we’re relying on maths.

This course has already been presented a couple of times and the pass rates have been extremely high: in fact, everyone who completed the course in its first presentation passed it. As the course shows, if you know the historical and cultural context, and if you know where the ideas came from, mathematics is much easier to understand. Numbers evolved because all societies needed to count, but the story of our number system takes many twists and turns before reaching the familiar decimal system we use today. For example, it took some millennia before zero was invented, and there are living fossils such as the 60 minutes in an hour from the Mesopotamian sexagesimal number system.

Ancient Greeks geometry

But maths is much more than numbers. The Egyptians began to develop geometry because the Nile flooded every year and they needed it to redraw the land boundaries, while for the Ancient Greeks geometry was part of philosophy. Algebra developed in what is today Iraq because all kinds of practical problems needed it, starting from clunky early forms and special cases to the streamlined version you learned – or probably didn’t – at school. Even the calculus, that most revered and reviled area of mathematics, ceases to be hard to understand when put in an historical and cultural context. Newton was a cranky irascible character engaged in a bitter dispute with Leibniz as to who invented it first (Newton did, but Leibniz invented a better notation, so a sort of dishonourable draw).

Fast-forward through complex numbers and strange geometries to infinity and beyond. Georg Cantor discovered that some infinities are larger than others, and then went mad (for different reasons). In 1900 the German mathematician David Hilbert posed 23 problems to celebrate the new millennium. This unleashed a furious Olympic-like competitiveness to win the gold medals and eternal glory. But then catastrophe! In 1931 Gödel showed that some mathematical problems have no solution – they’re undecidable. Most mathematicians carried on regardless, and since then the world of mathematics has exploded with new ideas, concepts and results. More new mathematics has been discovered since World War II than was known up to that time.

Culture shift

Phew! TM190 moves through time and space, from Egypt and Mesopotamia four thousand years ago, via China and India and many other parts of the world, to the Arizona desert and a tea-room in Princeton in the 1970s. The pace is set by four stunning OU–BBC television programmes presented by Marcus du Sautoy, Oxford University’s Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, who traces the history of mathematics in a highly entertaining way, starting with the quotation above. These programmes, broadcast last January on BBC World to an estimated 200 million homes world-wide, are sent as DVDs to all TM190 students. 

No matter how little maths you know, this course brings the subject to life and makes it accessible. We believe that if every schoolteacher in the UK studied the course, especially infants and junior teachers, it would create a new sense of confidence and enjoyment in mathematics, even if they’re not maths teachers. Such an interdisciplinary approach can enrich all subjects. One can image heated discussions in the staff room between the history, geography, science and language teachers on some aspect of mathematics, and the ideas spilling over into their various lessons. The resulting culture shift would raise the level of mathematics understanding and teaching by an order of magnitude, and enable our children to learn and enjoy the subject in a way not available to many of their parents. We’re trying to persuade the Government and opposition politicians to grasp this opportunity and make possible this quantum shift in mathematics. Whatever happens at the next election, this would be an historic and enduring achievement for any politicians to have associated with their names.

To study TM190 The Story of Maths click here.

Pic credit: *Zara.