22.09.2000 - By STACEY BODGER
Four maths whiz-kids have achieved what New Zealand athletes are struggling to do - win medals in Australia.
The number-crunchers have topped a field of nearly half a million in the "maths Olympics," the Australian Mathematics Competition.
Aucklanders Richard Yu, aged 14, from King's College, Robert Bowmaker, 13, from Rosmini College, and Jacky Lo, 14, from Pakuranga College, are still eagerly waiting for their final marks.
But they and Victor Lo of Christchurch have won medals for outstanding performances in the one-hour exam, which they sat last month.
Only 47 of the 487,000 students from 37 countries who took part gained medals.
Robert Bowmaker said of his top placing: "I'm excited because it was the first time I had entered. I love maths and I've already started playing around with some computer programming because that's what I want to use my maths for." Richard Yu, who also wants to be a computer programmer, said maths exercised his brain. The success of the four has heartened Otago University mathematics professor Derek Holton, who said in a Herald opinion piece that New Zealanders were largely ignorant about maths and put sport ahead of education.
"It's a fantastic success and evidence that New Zealand has some extremely good students.
"Perhaps if we threw more resources behind education, we could have 10 more medal winners."
The students will receive their medals in Melbourne next month.
11.09.2000 - By DEREK HOLTON*
I've been worrying about something for 15 years or more. In fact, I'm so worried that I'm not sure I want to say what it is I'm worrying about.
Usually when I confess the source of my concern, shutters go up, some people turn away, and others simply say, "I was never any good at maths."
There, I've let it out. I'm worried about mathematics. And I'm worried, not just because I'm a professional in the area (and so to some extent I'm paid to worry). Rather, I'm worried because if we are going to bring off this knowledge economy thing, then we will need people who can do maths and who understand the subject.
Where is the next generation of mathematically able people going to come from? In recent times we've had international and Education Review Office reports confirming that we're not up there with the Singaporeans and Koreans. And what do we have to do to get there? Well, that's what I've been worrying about.
Let's put the boot on the other foot for a moment. Suppose Singapore looked at us and decided that it wanted to be a first-class rugby nation. What would Singapore do?
Surely if it wanted change quickly it would start throwing money around. It would buy in overseas coaches. It would train its own coaches. It would set up a strong internal competition.
It would try to attract top rugby nations to play it regularly. It would set up a strong junior competition to provide a training ground for good players hoping to make the national team.
But that by itself might be insufficient. Singapore might not succeed on the international rugby stage because the Singaporean physique tends to be slender.
Or maybe Singaporean parents don't want their children to play such a hard, physical game. It's also possible that their children would rather do something else.
To get round those problems, the new and improved Singapore Rugby Football Union would have to work hard to show the general population how important and exciting the game is and why they should become involved.
What worries me most about mathematics is that we have precisely that situation in this country. We have a population that are largely ignorant of the subject, were glad when they didn't have to do it ever again and see no great need for it.
We need to get people to agree that this thing is necessary for our future survival as one of the richest countries in the world. When we surmount this obstacle then we may have a chance of getting somewhere.
Oh, it has suddenly occurred to me that you and I may not be speaking the same language. What you mean by mathematics may not be what I mean by mathematics.
Mathematics isn't just sums. It's not just about knowing how to add, subtract, multiply, divide and do some algebraic manipulations. Maths is also about thinking, about problem-solving, about being creative.
Sure it's important to be able to do arithmetic and to be able to use algebra. But in business and personal life, solving problems is a fundamental skill.
Most problems that you run across outside school are nothing much like those you have been trained to solve in school. So it is necessary to learn how to solve problems in a flexible and creative way.
Maths taught well can provide the framework and confidence for solving new problems. It is this training that makes maths potentially such an important subject for the knowledge economy.
There are two things to add at this point. First, in Asia parents support education in the same way that many of us give our support to our children's sporting activities.
This doesn't have to be an either/or business. I'm not saying, "No sport - just hit the books." Rather, I am suggesting that for the country's good, we may need to place more emphasis on education.
And the second thing is that although mathematicians don't earn as much as professional rugby players, there are more jobs for mathematicians than for rugby players. So it may be a better strategy to train for a maths career than a rugby one.
That brings me to the "coaches" - teachers. Can we lift their game? Certainly we can. None of us, even university professors, is so good that he or she can't improve. So how do we go about this?
First, let's talk potential teachers. Why would you want to be a teacher? The pay? The conditions? The approval of society?
Whether you are a teacher of maths or anything else, the pay isn't good. Some teachers may not pay off their student loans until they are over 50.
What about conditions? In your workplace are you making important decisions every second and handling people who would rather be somewhere else?
And where do teachers sit on the list of most popular occupations? Are they still above brain surgeons?
There is much room for improvement in pay, conditions and society's valuation of teaching. Yet many people still choose it as a profession. They want to help kids. So who is going to help the teachers?
Surely this starts in their training. Can we give primary trainees a good solid background and an enthusiasm for maths?
Is it really true that not all providers of teacher education insist on a minimum level of mathematical ability for primary trainees? Or do providers expect and accept too low a level of mathematical ability?
Can we fill trainee classes only by accepting students with very poor mathematical backgrounds?
What about teachers who are already in the system? Well, the Ministry of Education has initiatives to support mathematics in primary classes. But these don't reach all teachers. Perhaps it should be part of the job description for teachers to undertake regular professional development.
So before we wring our hands and bemoan the fact that we aren't so high on some international mathematical scale, we, as a country, have to decide that mathematics is an important subject.
If it is, then we have to decide what action to follow. Where are our weaknesses? Where do we need to improve?
This all raises the following questions: should we spend more time on maths in school? What is the best teaching practice?
How do we make maths accessible to all students? How can we help teachers to improve?
You can see why I'm worried. But a worry shared is a worry halved. I'm feeling less worried already. But what's half of infinity?
* Derek Holton is a professor of mathematics at Otago University.
23.09.2000 -
The front-page treatment which this newspaper accorded the achievements of four young mathematics medal-winners will have pleased more people than Professor David Holton. When he argued in these pages that we ought to treat education, and mathematics in particular, with as much attention as we give to sport, he was singing a song popular with many of our more serious readers.
He stated his case with studied moderation, careful not to attack sport, merely saying that more credit was needed for education. Others are less delicate: they demand a world in which achievers in solid pursuits - scientists, economists, accountants - are treated like Olympic medallists.
Sport is a trivial pursuit, they declare. And, of course, they are right. Looked at coldly, sport is completely futile. Take the triathletes killing themselves to complete a journey you could achieve in a fraction of the time, and with much less effort, on a ferry and a bus.
Much sport is wilfully anachronistic, depending on long-dead martial skills. To be relevant, the Olympics should have freestyle landmine-planting or mortar-firing. Instead, there is horse riding, archery, fencing, javelin throwing, sailing - all pursuits which once had a practical application but which would leave no hole in the conduct of the world's business if they disappeared.
But ludicrous though sports may be in their own right, champions of intellectual ability are condemned to disappointment. It might be regrettable, but mathematics is just not sexy. By its very nature it engages the intellect rather then the emotions.
In science, fulfilment arrives slowly and without drama. Those celebrated lightning flashes of enlightenment, like Archimedes' dash from the pool shouting "eureka" or Newton being apple-bombed, all turn out to be fables. Modern science is a corporate venture. Mathematics and science competitions are reported but it takes more than a stretch of the imagination to picture them running in prime time.
"Here's Lobachevsky coming up to the first set of quadratic equations. The chalk's absolutely flying across the blackboard. Von Neumann is in silver-medal position, making his comeback after a year's suspension when he tested positive to too much omega oil in his bloodstream. Can they hold off the brilliant Poincareaac, the Anna Kournikova of differential calculus?" It's not convincing. And sport boasts not only the instant rush of drama but is usually enacted by young, healthy individuals of considerable physical appeal. There are exceptions. Some of the shooters and equestrian performers are not in the radiant flush of youth and some sports favour physical extremes that are not consonant with the average idea of beauty. Nevertheless, even the most ungainly basketballer or muscle-bound weightlifter is more likely than the equivalent geology lecturer to excite the pulse rate of the audience. It is, perhaps, a matter of shame that we are captured by beauty rather than brains. But that's a tendency which the human race appears to have suffered from since creation. The ideal is when intellectual and physical qualities are combined, and sport does throw up examples of that, too. It hardly seemed fair to discover that the impossibly good-looking, muscularly awesome Pieter van den Hoogenband, the Dutch Olympic multiple medallist, was a medical student, a breed usually distinguished by high academic achievement.
Yet if the young swimmer had had the intelligence of an underachieving wombat he would still have been an international hero, with a status and respect that his country's greatest mathematical talent could never attain. Until human nature changes, intellectuals will have to settle for job satisfaction and peer respect. The glamour will stay in the stadium.
"Glamour boys of maths" [Herald headline]
I am a mathematician. I was alerted to your editorial "Maths and glamour don't add up" by the chuckling of my wife imagining the blackboard Olympics you describe (and she, a slightly more glamorous biologist, ought to have known better).
I explained that Lobachevsky (1793-1856) was the discoverer of a certain geometry which cosmologists now believe describes the large-scale structure of the universe; Von Neumann (1903-1957), the "father" of the electronic computer (and much else); and Poincare (1854-1912) one of the greatest scientists of all time -- three people of true vision and during fame.
"The Anna Kournikova of differential calculus" indeed. Who's going to remember her in 10 years, let alone a century or more?
As for Hoogenband, one of the greatest Dutch mathematicians ever was Ch. Huygens (1629-1695). He invented the pendulum clock and made major contributions to the world in which we live. His country is replete with statues and official portraits (even stamps) of him. How many do you think they will make of a swimmer?
More recently a Dutch professor of mathematical physics (t'Hooft) won the Nobel Prize. His name will live longer than Hoogenband nationally and internationally (compare Rutherford and any Olympic athlete here).
It is true that New Zealanders by and large fail to appreciate that there are many scientists and scholars, across all disciplines, of very high calibre living and working here. This failure only contributes to the "brain drain".
The Olympics are a four-yearly, high-profile international benchmarking exercise. Academics at my institution are benchmarked internationally every day in all aspects of their work. There are true world leaders here, yet who would know it? Why can we not celebrate their acheivements more widely and use them as role models for our children.
It might not be as excitingas watching a 100m sprint, but I believe that we as a country would be better off for it. Surely we can at least acknowledge excellenceacross a greater spectrum of endeavour. And you never know, you might find some interesting (dare I say glamorous?) stories there as well.
Gaven Martin
Though by no means a proponent of mediocrity, I do think the only-winning-matters advocates are going a little too far. I suspect that sport is similar to mathematics, music, literature and other areas of human endeavour in that excellence and conspicuous success arise most naturally in a society where these activities are valued and participated in for their own sakes.
New Zealand is keen on sport and has a rich sporting culture and this is reflected in that, even in its least successful Olympics in more than 30 years, we still have more medals a head than all but a handful of countries.
In non-sporting areas we have also had more successes that might be expected of a small country. Our most famous scientist, Rutherford, was an early Nobel prizewinner; a New Zealander, Vaughan Jones, is the only person from the Southern Hemisphere to win a Fields Medal, the "Nobel Prize of mathematics"; a New Zealand choir was recently judged "Choir of the World" in Wales, where choral singing is really valued.
A more comprehensive list of the scientific and cultural achievements of New Zealanders would fill pages. So I hope we can be proud of the efforts as well as the successes of the people who make this small country significant in the world, beyond what might be expected from its tiny population.
J. C. Butcher