Wild boasts of being very bad at maths just don't add up

You don’t go around proclaiming ignorance of literature. Why then revel in innumeracy?

WHAT'S THAT Shakespeare on about? It's all forsooth this and hey-nonny-nonny that. Give me a good Murder She Wroteany day. At least the producers of that show make an effort to conceal the killer's identity until the last few minutes. You don't get that with so-called Shakespeare.

Look, I’m going to come clean here. I didn’t know where Liberia was until last week, when the news channels began broadcasting all that stuff about the imminent fall of Gen Gadafy. Do I have that right?

No, you haven't accidentally picked up a copy of The Moron Bulletin. The above is a way of edging into the ever-thorny subject of public attitudes to science and mathematics. Over the past week, following the publication of dismally poor Leaving Cert results in higher mathematics, the nation's guardians have indulged in an unprecedented degree of teeth-grinding.

Some sort of initiative has been launched. Anybody who can solve a quadratic equation unaided will be granted an acre of land and an ox. Learning your nine-times tables will now be the only qualification required to attend actuarial school. Those sorts of things.

Happily, most commentators have resisted the temptation to blame the unfortunate teachers. One correspondent to this paper felt the influence of religion in schools was to blame. Obviously, any chance to bash the faith floggers should be greedily grabbed, but that does sound like a bit of a stretch.

Maybe the internet is to blame. It’s to blame for everything these days. Isn’t it?

Whatever the origins, an unmistakable apathy – even hostility – continues to characterise mainstream discourse on mathematics in this country (and others).

Here’s where the hilarious parody at the top of the article comes in. Otherwise well-educated people will not only readily admit to a lack of mathematical facility; they will positively boast about that deficit.

Listen to this idiot over here. He’s read every one of Gabriel García Márquez’s novels. He’s sat through an entire season of Ingmar Bergman films.

He knows the difference between Rothko and Pollock. But he still feels able to say something like: “Oh, I could never make head nor tale of maths at school. I was a total dunce.”

Yeah. You said it, mate. If I hadn't just made you up, I'd go round to your house and smack you in the face with a copy of Thomas-Finney's Calculus and Analytical Geometry.

This crudely caricatured fat head – God, I really am starting to hate this guy – would never boast about finding Shakespeare difficult or not being able to locate what’s left of Libya on a map.

Yet too many people adopt a puzzlingly smug tone when explaining their ignorance of mathematics.

Over the last half-century or so, we have allowed those with a taste for hard sums to be repeatedly represented as nerds. For a current example seek out a mordantly unfunny television show entitled The Big Bang Theory.

This depressing bucket of tripe focuses on four physics geniuses at the California Institute of Technology. The chief joke (if it can be so dignified) is that each is a socially maladroit, sexually inhibited buffoon. The implication is clear: science is just plain weird and those who master it belong in a dungeon. Laugh? I almost proved the Riemann Hypothesis.

Knowledge of the sciences should be as important to the rounded human being as a grasp of canonical literature or an understanding of contemporary politics.

But mathematics and physics make only the most fleeting of appearances in the main body of serious newspapers. Such things are rarely discussed in the saloon bars of the capital.

The key to breaking down the barrier between what physicist CP Snow – to the annoyance of that arch-fraud FR Leavis – referred to as “the two cultures” involves coaching science back into common discourse.

That’s to say we would, in some unimaginable Utopia, like to hear smart folk ponder Carl Friedrich Gauss as often as they consider William Shakespeare.

That is, it must be admitted, asking quite a bit. If you speak English you can, without any further coaching, take a crack at The Two Gentleman of Verona.The average, proudly innumerate citizen will have trouble mounting a similar assault on the fundamental theory of algebra.

But here’s the thing. Adventurous adults are forever embarking on new voyages of discovery. They go to ballroom dancing classes. They learn how to throw pots. They teach themselves French. Well, mathematics is less exhausting than dancing, less messy than working in clay and considerably more logical than any Romance language. It’s also unimaginably beautiful.

If mathematics is discussed in the parlour then school students will feel less daunted by the prospect of taking up the subject. Grades will soar.

The concept of the nerd will wither. The Big Bang Theorywill be cancelled. Everyone's a winner.