{"id":58905,"date":"2012-11-14T16:52:03","date_gmt":"2012-11-14T16:52:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/test.tehelka.com\/?p=58905"},"modified":"2012-11-14T16:52:03","modified_gmt":"2012-11-14T16:52:03","slug":"the-great-leveller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/the-great-leveller\/","title":{"rendered":"The great leveller"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marcus du Sautoy<\/strong>\u00a0would have you look beyond the numbers and find that mathematics is as much about literature and history. By\u00a0Ajachi Chakrabarti\u00a0<\/em><\/em>
\n

\"\"<\/a>
Marcus du Sautoy,<\/strong> 47, Mathematician
Photo: Rohit Chawla<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nIN 1637,<\/strong>\u00a0lawyer and amateur mathematician Pierre de Fermat famously wrote in the margin of his copy of Diophantus\u2019\u00a0Arithmetica<\/em>: \u201cIt is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general, any power higher than the second, into two like powers. I have discovered a truly marvellous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain.\u201d He was right; it was too narrow. Three hundred and fifty seven years later, when Cambridge professor Andrew Wiles finally proved what became known as Fermat\u2019s Last Theorem, earning him a knighthood and many other honours, the proof was more than a 100 pages long, and incorporated a number of new branches of mathematics created after Fermat\u2019s death; branches that, to a large extent, had been created by generations of mathematicians trying to prove the infernal theorem.
\n<\/strong>Marcus du Sautoy does something similar when asked to autograph one of his popular books on mathematics. Especially when asked to sign one for a school student, he often prefaces his signature with \u201c2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23… Find the pattern,\u201d presumably in the hope that some kid somewhere will someday do just that and find a truly marvellous function to predict prime numbers, solving one of the great mysteries of mathematics and rendering all computer security systems, which rely precisely on the lack of such a pattern, redundant.
\n<\/strong>Du Sautoy, who succeeded Richard Dawkins as Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, works primarily for students and adults to appreciate the beauty of maths and be inspired to explore the complexity of the subject. \u201cI don\u2019t do my maths because it\u2019s useful,\u201d he says. \u201cUltimately, it may be useful, but I do it because there\u2019s something extraordinarily beautiful about the subject.\u201d He\u2019s done this by writing books, hosting television and radio shows, and talking to all who listen \u2014 and there are quite a few who do \u2014 about the power of mathematics. But the real problem, he feels, lies in the way maths is taught in school.
\n\u201cThe one thing that is really lacking in maths curriculum the world over,\u201d he says, \u201cis telling the big stories of maths. We concentrate very much on the technical side of mathematics, but we give students very little insight into what it allows you to access. I think in any other subject in school, such as learning a musical instrument, you\u2019ve got to do a lot of technical things like scales and arpeggios. That\u2019s boring, but necessary, because it gives you the facility to play fantastic music. The thing that a music teacher will do is play for the students the wonderful music they\u2019re aspiring to play. The kid will be inspired to want to achieve a level that allows him to play, compose and create his own music. Then they put in the hard grafting, because you can\u2019t get away without hard work.\u201d
\nIn Goa, du Sautoy was often stopped by people who had heard him speak and wanted him to know that they wished they had a maths teacher like him in school. The difference between university and school maths education, he says, is that in university, you are preaching to the converted \u2014 students who love the subject enough to choose to study it \u2014 whereas in school, you get a much greater diversity, and the disenfranchisement of the student often means that teachers are talking to them at the wrong level.
\n\u201cThere are many different ways in which people access information,\u201d he says. \u201cYou need to use a multiplicity of tools in order to bring each of your students into your ideas. Some people really love technology, so understanding that primes are the key to Internet cryptography or that eigenvalues and matrices are used to run Google, that\u2019ll bring them in. Other people respond to more artistic things, such as music, art or architecture. So showing them the maths in those will be their way in. Some people like history, and the history of mathematics will draw them in. And some people like maths for its own sake. So there can\u2019t be one way to teach maths, and different things work for different people.\u201d
\nDu Sautoy says he is planning to approach the British government to introduce a course on the literature of mathematics. \u201cI\u2019m trying to talk to the British government and say to them, \u2018Why don\u2019t we be the first country to say that yes, we need our kids to know about sines, cosines and logarithms, but why don\u2019t they learn about how Fibonacci numbers are present in nature or the power of prime numbers?\u2019\u201d
\nTelling the big stories is not useful merely to inspire students, he says. \u201cI understood my subject in a much deeper way by going through the lives of people like (Bernhard) Riemann,\u201d he says, \u201cand understanding things like how he created the Riemann zeta function. It was a bit of a tangential journey. He was interested in a new analytical function he could put complex numbers into, and it somehow unlocked the secret of the primes. I think you learn strategies by understanding how the people in history arrived at solutions.\u201d
\nHe calls it a tragedy when told that most Indian students memorise proofs for examinations, saying that you are missing the whole point if you are learning the proof. \u201cThe power of mathematics is that you need no memory,\u201d he says, \u201cbecause once you actually understand the ideas, you can always reconstruct them. One needs to really wean people off the idea of memorising for exams. This can be done through exams that cannot be answered by pure reproduction of proofs, where you have to understand the proof to answer the question because there\u2019s a slight perturbation. I think it\u2019s really essential that the education somehow celebrates the power of proof as a tool for relieving you of memory.\u201d
\nAjachi Chakrabarti is a Correspondent with Tehelka.<\/em>
\najachi@tehelka.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marcus du Sautoy, who succeeded Richard Dawkins as Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, works primarily for students and adults to appreciate the beauty of maths and be inspired to explore the complexity of the subject<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":75,"featured_media":58910,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21],"tags":[8040,8086,1641,8087,7173,8088,8089,8090,8091,8092],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58905"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/75"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58905"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58905\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}