Early in the week I met up with an old friend. While there was a lot that we could have talked about (and we did), a good part of our conversation was maths related.

My friend did not do particularly well at school and found himself in the bottom class. He left with few if any qualifications. Years later, he found himself taking an interest in maths and decided to rise to the challenge of taking and then obtaining a degree. Even to this day that interest continues. He shared that one of his current reading projects was a book(s) on Euclidean geometry. I discovered that: “Euclid is a renowned ancient Greek mathematician, often called the “father of geometry”, and best known for his treatise “The Elements,” which established the foundations of geometry. He lived around 300 BC in Alexandria, Egypt. The “Elements” provided rigorous proofs for geometric theorems and influenced mathematicians like Isaac Newton and Nicolaus Copernicus”.

Going back to my past maths involvement, I was better than most of my peers at school in maths although there were always those better than I. I went on to get decent “O” and “A” Level passes in maths and studied it as a subsidiary subject at university. Other than having some opportunities to teach the subject, my involvement was thereafter fairly minimal, as I did not need to use maths other than occasionally in my computing career, but my interest continued. I sometimes find myself watching maths related YouTube videos, e.g. relating to someone making a maths contribution, e.g. Andrew Wiles proving Fermat’s Last Theorem. I have sometimes thought if I could go back in time I would have liked to have done a maths degree and then taught the subject and, when I did a history degree, studied the History of Mathematics. One of the beauties of maths is that while there may be more than one way to solve a problem, invariably there is only one right answer – it is the purest of the disciplines. It is a delight to note that some of the best mathematicians have been or are Christians, one of which is Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University, John Lennox, who is also an apologist for the faith!

It seems to me that all individuals can be placed somewhere on the fully getting it to fully not getting it continuum when it comes to understanding maths concepts and in being able to apply them. I recently had an opportunity to help a young lad to prepare for his maths GCSE in the week that has just gone. Like many, probably most, he had his struggles and was some way from being a member of the understanding and applying concepts first time brigade (often needing many attempts to master, if ever) but he wanted to pass in order to progress. As he had gone through the syllabus, our approach was to go over past papers (one with and one without calculator). It was good to find these could be downloaded from the Internet, along with model answers and marking schemes. I expected none of that should cause me (as the tutor) to be a problem and it proved to be the case, although there was lot of terminology that I was not familiar with. I especially enjoyed the elegance of some of the solutions. I confess to amusement that the questions were politically correct and mindful of practical application. Besides reminding my student of the need to read the question, use the time allowed wisely, show working out and of the methods needed in tackling the questions, I would also point out that maths is beautiful.

Just prior to writing this, I decided to watch two videos by another Oxford professor of Maths, Tom Crawford, (see here and here). The content was to do with him taking a past maths GCSE paper and of his work being marked by a colleague, which I found refreshingly fascinating as well as reinforcing my present maths excitement.