The Education Vector

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 21

The Education Vector¶

April 1997

Editor Ian Clark

This Education Vector has been reprinted from VECTOR Vol.13 No.4. VECTOR is the Quarterly Journal of the British APL Association. For more information about the British APL Association, please contact: Sylvia Camacho, [address and telephone number omitted].

Contents¶

J-ottings 13 (Norman Thomson) has been held for the next issue - sorry

Editorial¶

Mathematics departments in England are to lose 38% of their funding over the next three years, according to a recent circular from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). Due to a reclassification for funding purposes to 'partly lab-based', £9.2M will go down to £5.7M in 1999. New Scientist magazine (1 March, 1997) quotes John Kingman, the vice chancellor of the University of Bristol as calling it 'potentially disastrous'.

So Mathematics, once the Queen of Sciences, is an expendable luxury in the new republic of intellectual England. At one time the provenance of Mathematics was any formalism whatever. Yet most subjects formalise nowadays. They do it idiosyncratically and independently, to their lasting loss. But Mathematics has clearly lost its monopoly in the matter, just as Latin lost it 50 years or so ago as an essential requirement to enter University. You don't need a mathematical training to program nowadays, nor to be an electrical engineer. Nor even to teach mathematics in schools, but that's just scandalous.

We used to tell ourselves 'scientists seem to find mathematics so hard, yet you can teach a mathematician anything.' Belied by the facts, I fear. When you are admitting well-qualified students to an MSc Mathematics course, and you find most of them pretty bad at applying their impressive formal knowledge to solving realistic problems, you feel they might as well have graduated in Egyptology. Mathematicians have largely brought it upon themselves.

In my old department, mathematicians were unwilling bedfellows with computer scientists (by then I was numbered among the latter). They used to teach subsidiary mathematics on our courses and fail our best students by making them jump through hoops. We simply wrote Mathematics out of our syllabus, because we felt we could teach whatever formal principles our students needed with far more relevance and impact. Our head of department was an applied mathematician who used to resist attempts to refer to his subject as 'Maths'. 'Would you like yours called "Phys" or "Chem"?' he'd retort. I used to annoy him by describing myself as an ex-mathematician. Eight years at the cutting edge of human-computer interaction had cast a new and critical light on my erstwhile colleagues. It began to look as if mathematicians cultivated their reputation by obfuscating their subject.

I now look back and see I was being perhaps a trifle unfair. It is truer to say that mathematicians quickly learn that they are NOT doing their careers a favour by NOT mystifying their subject a little. When you share staff rooms and access to funds with fellow academics who are not ashamed to flaunt their mathematical ignorance as a touchstone of quality ('He can't be all that good — why even I could understand what he said!') you learn that to make your subject comprehensible to a donkey is to risk submitting yourself to the judgement of an ass.

Nevertheless I feel I'm witnessing the mass-extinction of an entire ecology. When I started applying computers seriously in central government, we used to joke that simulations were what you did to amuse yourself while you thought up an analytical solution. Now whole skills will disappear as practitioners retire. The youngsters who replace them will never know a better way. In the words of Wilfrid Owen: 'now men will go content with what we spoiled.'

Ian Clark, IAC/Human Interfaces,
[address omitted]

[telephone number and e-mail address omitted]