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You're reading: Posts By Peter Rowlett
Historical anniversaries: are they worth celebrating?
It probably hasn’t escaped your attention that this year marks 100 years since Alan Turing was born, and that the actual anniversary of his birth is tomorrow. There is massive interest in this fact, both from specialist maths and computing outlets and the mainstream press. What, though, is the significance? You don’t need me to tell you that any anniversary is fairly arbitrary. The earth has gone a whole number of times around the sun since the event (within some margin of error). What, really, does this mean? And attributing special interest to one particular number of anniversaries just because it is a factor of ten or a neat fraction of one hundred is wholly meaningless.
So I don’t fall for anything like that, right? Wrong. For a couple of years now I have been tweeting a link to a biography of a mathematician who was born or died on each date to the Twitter feed @mathshistory on behalf of the British Society for the History of Mathematics. This generates some interest and I am delighted when it does so.
So can I justify anniversaries as having some tremendous significance or is this all just a cynical attempt to grab attention? To a great extent it is the latter. BSHM have a charitable aim to “promote and develop for the public benefit, awareness, knowledge, study and teaching of the history of mathematics”. If anniversaries are going to generate greater awareness of and interest in history, then I’m in.
For the daily tweeting I rely entirely on the excellent MacTutor History of Mathematics archive (so much so that some people think I run the site, or MacTutor runs the Twitter feed).
Basically, I choose a mathematician who was born or died on each day according to a bunch of constraints. People sometimes tweet and say “why have you chosen X; what about Y?”
The basic ground rules are: one tweet per day, each mathematician once per year. This causes some conflicts that people don’t naturally understand. For example, on 23rd January I tweeted about James Lighthill, who MacTutor describes as “one of the foremost English applied mathematicians of his day”. Why, wondered Twitter user @gemmarobles, was I ignoring David Hilbert, also born that day? Well, I included Lighthill on his birthday because he died on the same day that Lexis was born, who MacTutor report as “initiating the study of time series”. And Lexis died on the day Galois was born. And although there are a few mathematicians who were born or died on 14th February, when Hilbert died, there is no clear issue with placing Hilbert on that day. So why did I choose Lighthill over Hilbert? Because Galois was born on the day Lexis died. At some point, an arbitrary decision needs to be made and this has consequences down the line.
Apart from these basic constraints, I have a bunch of extra rules. I am doing this to try to generate interest, so I try include some variety. I like to try to tweet from different eras and different mathematical areas on adjacent days if possible. I favour time periods when few dates are known or cultures without many mathematicians in the database because these have fewer opportunities to get picked. I also think it is good to highlight women in mathematics or other important issues such as race or disability, again if possible. It is also pleasing to make people aware of the mathematical contributions of mathematicians who are better known for something else, or people who were not principally mathematicians but made a contribution. Anyone who meets some of these criteria might see favour over other mathematicians associated with the same day.
Still, much as I like to include mathematicians that people won’t know and highlight time periods and issues they haven’t thought about, it is the big hitters, Euler and Gauss and other well known names, who get the large numbers of retweets and interest. So I include them because that is how followership of the account grows and links to maths history content spread. If people are only going to take an interest on a famous anniversary, at least they are taking an interest at all.
Do I think the world has gone over the top on Turing? I do think there is value to be had. Leveraging Turing’s name and the interest generated by his centenary to attempt to do some good for gay rights is a noble undertaking (although I have my doubts over the precise details). Using Turing to try to generate extra interest in the history of mathematics, cryptography and computing is worthwhile. If we aren’t going to get people’s attention at the big 100, when will we? I remember seeing a lecture by Robin Wilson where he lamented the relative lack of interest in the 300th anniversary of Euler’s birth in 2007, which could have been a great opportunity to raise the profile of mathematics in wider culture. It’s clear to see why the 305th anniversary this year just hasn’t got the same traction.
However, I worry about the others involved with the war work at Bletchley Park or the early development of computers who are getting eclipsed, and, for that matter, all the other history of maths and computing stories that are worth telling but can’t get the attention. Celebrating the big names supports the idea that advances are made in giant leaps by great men (mostly men), whereas history is constantly being made in small steps. On top of this, I worry that the attention people are giving Turing is fairly superficial. People aren’t, I think, gaining a wider understanding of the historical context into which Turing fits, or of the place of mathematics research in our culture. And I worry that this interest won’t be sustained. What happens in the cold light of Sunday morning when it’s all over? Perhaps we can sustain some interest until the end of the centenary year but will ‘Turing100’ have a lasting impact on people’s minds? Turing died in 1954. Will we ignore him again until 2054?
Anyway, must dash. I have to draft my exciting Turing centenary day post for tomorrow.
Aperiodcast – 21/06/2012
Here’s another Aperiodcast, covering things that happened on the site between the 4th and the 20th of June.
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Ability with fractions and division aged 10 predicts ability with algebra aged 16
Last week we reported that the UK Government have released a draft primary school Programme of Study for mathematics for consultation. A report from the Telegraph quoted in that article mentioned that “the use and multiplication of fractions” was “a vital precursor to studying algebra”. A piece of research published in the journal Psychological Science, ‘Early Predictors of High School Mathematics Achievement‘, investigates this area. The findings indicate the importance of learning about fractions and division by showing that these “uniquely predict” students’ knowledge of algebra and overall mathematics achievement 5 or 6 years later.
Math/Maths 101: Ian Stewart Live from the Cheltenham Festival
A new episode of the Math/Maths Podcast has been released.
A conversation about mathematics between the UK and USA from Pulse-Project.org. This week Samuel and Peter were joined live from the Cheltenham Science Festival by surprise (to everyone involved) special guest Ian Stewart who chatted about the mathematics behind board game strategy, mathematical thinking through gameplay and presenting mathematical theories to the media. Also from Cheltenham they were joined by Jocelyn D’Arcy to talk about Maths Jam and Matt Parker’s show, and John Read to talk about a wide range of talks he’s seen at the Festival. Around this Samuel and Peter chatted to each other about: how childhood mathematics performance is affected by obesity and knowledge of fractions and division; the draft UK primary mathematics changes now available for consultation; a study which proves that bears can ‘count’ too; The Turing Solution; Blue plaque to Turing to be unveiled live online; James Grime’s support for e-petition to put Alan Turing on the next £10 note; Sir Tim Gowers; and more.
Get this episode: Math/Maths 101: Ian Stewart Live from the Cheltenham Festival
A possible contender to the Duckworth-Lewis method
Readers may be aware of the Duckworth/Lewis method for deciding how many runs the second team should score in a game of cricket foreshortened by rain, in order to beat the first team; a triumph of communicating complex mathematical ideas to a lay audience, described in an article by Frank Duckworth.
Duckworth describes some of the problems with more linear methods for deciding such matters and high profile problems that led to the acceptance of D/L as an alternative. Now, an article on the ESPNcricinfo website explains, a method developed by V. Jayadevan (the VJD method; in a paper in 2002) may perform the same trick – dealing with some of the inconsistencies which arise in certain scenarios using the D/L method. The article goes through three scenarios to illustrate the differences between the two methods.
However, as Frank Duckworth explains, getting D/L accepted was as much about communicating with a maths-phobic community as it was about a clever method.
Sources:
The rain equations: A look at how the Duckworth-Lewis and VJD methods work in different situations.
The Duckworth/Lewis method: an exercise in Maths, Stats, OR and communications (F. Duckworth).
Rob Eastaway on Twitter.
Mirror which could eliminate drivers’ blind spot receives US patent
A problem in optics has lead to a US patent for a car side mirror which “eliminates the dangerous ‘blind spot'” and “dramatically increases the field of view with minimal distortion” by finding approximate solutions for “the problem of controlling a single ray bundle with a single reflector”.