Incalculable importance of maths and historic figures who made it all add up

After all there is no hiding from it – a subject so rich and diverse that it is used to explain everything from the Big Bang to our chances of winning the Lottery. In everyday life we need maths to calculate how we make a four-person recipe into one that caters for eight, working out our bank balance or comparing special offers we come across in a shop or on the internet.

You might not work in a technical field that requires a high level of mathematical competence, but your life would be less organised (and even less satisfying) if you couldn’t do a simple calculation of percentages or work out how much paint to buy to cover four walls and a ceiling.

Even those of us who didn’t shine at calculus at school still get some glee from translating Farenheit to Celsius thanks to an easy little calculation we learned at the age of 10 that stuck because we were encouraged to look at the temperatures in far-flung places in the newspaper and change them back and forth just for fun until the method became second nature.

In the days before machines did everything, bar staff kept a running total of the price of long rounds of drinks in their heads then simply rang up a total. A good dressmaker or tailor could work out roughly in their head the amount of cloth needed to make a garment for a certain height and size of person before they’d even picked up their tape measure. We may mostly have lost those old skills, but maths is still unbelievably useful and absolutely omnipresent.

However useful, though, it’s probably a fact for most of us that maths has never been a source of excitement and deep curiosity unless you were lucky enough to have been taught by one of those very special people. In any case, whether you gave up the subject as quickly as you could or carried on with it to university in some shape or form, it’s unlikely that you’ll have been told much of its back story – the enormous characters involved in its evolution, who decided we should count in tens, why a circle has 360 degrees or why the Mayan calendar ends in 2012.

Perhaps many people who found maths frustrating at school and feel their skills are embarrassingly low-grade would have got much further with the subject if the teaching of it had been done in the context of why civilisations needed to develop ways of counting and how great discoveries were made. Chris Waring believes this to be true – which is why he has written an unthreateningly compact book called From 0 to infinity: The Extraordinary Story of Maths.

A maths teacher at Queen Ethelburga’s College in York, he has taught small children to count and helped young adults to impress for university entrance and at most levels in between. At 35 he hasn’t forgotten how he hit his own wall of difficulty with maths as a young teenager.

“I’d been doing fine, but then at 13 or 14 I had this teacher who everyone else thought was marvellous but I just didn’t get at all. I didn’t understand a word he said and my maths went rapidly downhill. At the end of the year my marks had slipped so badly that I was dropped down into a lower set. The teacher I had in that group was gifted in how he put the subject across. Thanks to him I was able to make up the ground I’d lost and had all guns blazing. The first teacher had one way of teaching, from first principles, and the second one had a variety of strategies to help him put maths across to children – including explaining context and telling interesting stories.”

Waring did maths as part of an engineering degree and dabbled briefly with head hunting before turning to teaching – which had always been in his head since his encounter with the Set Two teacher who rescued him as a teenager.

Thanks to a contact in publishing he was asked to contribute the maths section to the wonderful book I Used To Know That, which made its way onto the bestseller lists a few years back. His latest book tells the kind of stories behind the theory and mechanics of maths that he wishes could be given more time within the confines of the National Curriculum. There’s no doubt that learning about how Stone Age people could well have developed counting techniques with the help of grooves carved into a baboon thigh bone found in the Democratic Republic of Congo (in 1960) is bound to help colour a subject that Waring admits can be “very dry”. In short, maths needs more narrative.

“A lot of teaching is in general what you could call ‘teaching by numbers’,” he says. “There’s so much to get through to equip children with the demands of the National Curriculum, and so very little time to enhance understanding by including the details of how Pythagoras led a religious cult or exactly how Archimedes found a value for pi by using a polygon with up to 96 sides and the importance of his Method of Exhaustion... or that he was so pleased with his discovery that he had a sculpture of a sphere and cylinder erected on his tomb. Nor is there time to show that without Archimedes and the other ancient Greeks the pioneering work of Isaac Newton would largely have been impossible.”

Despite the obvious frustrations, what keeps Chris Waring at the chalk face – or white board – is the great satisfaction of helping children who may have hit a brick wall to understand something they previously thought was impossible. This, he says, applies equally whether you are teaching year 7 or someone who’s hoping to apply to Cambridge.

“It’s encouraging that we are now being asked increasingly to teach in a more non-traditional way – ‘less chalk and more talk’”, says Waring. “I feel this is a good thing, and definitely the way forward. Of course schools also have to battle against things that shatter children’s concentration, like the addictiveness of electronic devices and the way they feel they have to respond immediately every time their phone pings. We don’t allow phones in class unless special permission has been given for a specific reason.”

He acknowledges that certain people have a mental block regarding his subject, and at most parties he comes across adults who, as soon as reveals what his job is, seem to delight in telling him how bad they were at maths. However, he says more and more adults regret underperforming at maths when young, and are returning to the subject with GCSE courses at FE colleges.

“It’s great when an older person decides to do something about it and I really applaud that. With youngsters, you do get those who believe ‘maths is hard’ and very bright people who are underperforming. You have to take them back to the beginning in the area they are shaky in and, with a bit of luck and a fair wind, they can turn things around. That’s exactly what happened with me.”

When it comes to how much and what kind of help parents should give to their children at home, Chris Waring believes adults shouldn’t try to show off by doing their children’s homework for them. That might sound obvious, but some parents will take any opportunity to score points and boost their own ego.

“I would never want to send pupils home with work they couldn’t do, but if they were having problems the parent’s role is to help by teaching how to overcome a difficulty rather than doing it for the child.”

Waring approves of alternative qualifications for some pupils giving them certificates that cover understanding of the use of maths in everyday life. In general, though, he has a ready answer when a youngster says: ‘I want to be a lawyer; when am I going to need to solve a quadratic equation?’

“I argue that they could equally ask when will they need to know how a volcano erupts or what happens in Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Knowledge gives you choices. I’m a big believer in education for its own sake and its importance as the foundation that the human race is built on.”

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From 0 to Infinity in 26 Centuries The Extraordinary Story of Maths by Chris Waring is published by Michael O’Mara Books, £9.99. To order call 01748 821122. Postage costs £2.85.