If maths is boring, what is the answer?
Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at Wadham College, Oxford notes,
“Who said maths was boring? A report published by Ofsted last month claimed that pupils are simply turned off by the parrot learning of formulas to solve quadratic equations and the mindless application of the rules of trigonometry.
An obsession with teaching children solely to jump the hurdles of the testing regime is depriving a generation of a deeper understanding of the subject.
Everyone responds to good stories and mathematics is full of them, so why deprive students of the wonderful dramatis personae that have created our subject? As a professional mathematician, I have found that unearthing the stories behind my subject has been a revelation.
There’s something about π that grabs the imagination. It crops up across the sciences, from geometry and mechanics to statistics. If its superstar status was in doubt, there is a movie named after it.
The ancient Egyptians came up with one of the first approximations of it – 256 divided by 81 – derived from an early board game called mancala. For 4,000 years, the calculation of π has been a running theme through the history of maths.
Archimedes arrived at a well-known rough estimate – 22 divided by 7 – by drawing up his calculations from a 96-sided shape rather than a circle; his efforts were halted when he was killed by a Roman soldier.
Isaac Newton is said to have tried calculating it just to idle away the hours and made it as far as 15 decimal places. Today, a computer can easily calculate it to billions of digits, which must have helped Kate Bush write her song about π, in which she recites it to the 137th decimal place.” Read more on the fascinating history of mathematical discoveries from Marcus here.
