Skip to main content

David Acheson - Five Way Interview

David Acheson is Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and was the University's first winner of a National Teaching Fellowship in 2004. He was President of the Mathematical Association from 2010 to 2011, and now lectures widely on mathematics to young people and the general public. In 2013, Acheson was awarded an Honorary D.Sc. by the University of East Anglia for his outstanding work in the popularization of mathematics. His books include 1089 and All That (OUP, 2002), The Calculus Story, (OUP, 2017), and The Wonder Book of Geometry, (OUP, 2020). His latest is The Spirit of Mathematics.

Why maths?

There are so many possible answers to this, though I once tried to sum up mathematics at its best in just six words: wonderful theorems, beautiful proofs and great applications. 

Yet I’m inclined to give here a quite different answer, for the best mathematics, at any level, really lasts. While I am no philosopher, it seems to me that so many good things in life are here today and gone, if not  tomorrow, then in, say, 50 years’ time.  

And mathematics at its best just isn’t like that.

Why this book?

About 20 years ago I set out to write an ambitious book for the general public on the three great pillars of mathematics, namely geometry, algebra and calculus. The idea was to go one step further than traditional ‘popular maths’ books, by helping the reader to actually do some mathematics, as well as be inspired by it. And as the years went by, the book got steadily bigger and bigger, and eventually split into three.

The first to be actually finished was The Calculus Story, in 2017, followed three years later by The Wonder Book of Geometry. In a sense, then, the new book, with its slant towards algebra, completes a trilogy. 

Yet, even as I was writing it, I could feel the book gradually turning into something rather different, and that it was really going to be about mathematics at its best using only simple materials. And that is why, in the end, it narrowly missed out on some dubious title like ‘Fun with Algebra’, and became instead The Spirit of Mathematics.

Would we be better teaching what you might call ‘popular maths’ to school children, only adding in most of the detailed ‘how’ for those who are going to require it further at A-level/university?

I sometimes wonder if mathematics has almost become too successful for its own good. So many people want it – or at least need it – but they want or need different parts of it and for different purposes. This presents schools with a big problem, and I certainly wouldn’t claim to have the solution.

Another reason why I am hesitant about answering the question is that I have virtually no experience of actually teaching in a school. When I last ‘taught’ 6th-formers, for instance, I was on stage at the Piccadilly Theatre in London, in a big maths show, demonstrating the mathematics of vibrating strings with my electric guitar.

For what it’s worth, however, I do believe that schools would do best to help pupils develop a ‘big picture’ of mathematics, guided largely by its history, alongside the gradual acquisition of the most elementary mathematical skills. And I would suggest that they do this, too, almost from the very beginning, in primary school. 

This is because I have always believed that there is much to be said for the dictum: ‘if you have no idea where you’re going, don’t be too surprised if you never get there.’

What’s next?

I plan to write a book on dynamics, but, once again, aimed at the general public, and with a fairly strong historical slant, as with The Calculus Story.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

The book that I’m writing at present. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you anything about it, because I never talk about the book I’m actually working on.

This is not out of some absurd fear that my ideas might get stolen, but because of an almost pathological fear that those ideas might end up simply as ‘hot air’. For talking about writing a book is infinitely easier than actually doing it. 

In short, I’m with the humorist Peter de Vries, who once said, so memorably: ‘I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.’

Image by Geraint Lewis


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more