Pupils in England delivered strong A-level results this summer, with 42% of entrants getting A* or As in maths. Here are three questions to ponder
The class of 2024 proved exceptional at maths – but are you? Here are some questions pupils faced in last year’s A-level exams. The answers are at the bottom.
Turn over your exam paper and begin!
Continue reading...Gender stereotypes at home may hamper female students’ ability to progress in the classroom, research suggests
Parents are more likely to overestimate maths ability in sons than daughters, according to research that suggests that gender stereotypes at home may hinder the progress of female students.
The findings, presented in a lecture at University College London this week, found that parents tend to be overconfident about their children’s academic performance in reading and maths regardless of gender. But, in maths, parents overestimated boys’ skills to a significantly greater extent.
Continue reading...Research found 53% of teenagers in England who had been referred to services did not achieve a pass in both subjects
Children in England who are referred to social services at any point in their childhood are twice as likely to fail GCSE maths and English, according to new research published ahead of results day on Thursday.
Analysts looked at 1.6m pupils’ exam results over a three-year period and found that 53% of teenagers who had been referred to social care – as detailed in the Children in Need census – did not achieve a grade 4 pass in both English and maths GCSE.
Continue reading...Film-maker asked by No 10 to be ‘maths champion’ says ‘nobody thought to ask me whether I support this policy’
Downing Street has reportedly ditched a campaign to promote Rishi Sunak’s “maths to 18” policy after officials only obtained one case study – a film-maker who actually thinks the proposal is “misguided” and “tone deaf”.
The prime minister’s office appears to have left it until the last minute to seek endorsements from people across British industry for a social media push, the Times reports. Stephen Fellows, a leading film data analyst, was approached on Friday, three days before the PM relaunched the policy with a speech in London.
Continue reading...It is thought complaint refers to prime minister’s wife, Akshata Murty, being a shareholder in a childcare agency
Q: Are you going to have to offer more money to teachers?
Sunak says what is on offer is “a good and fair settlement”.
Continue reading...New Orleans students Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson recently presented their findings on the Pythagorean theorem
Two New Orleans high school seniors who say they have proven Pythagoras’s theorem by using trigonometry – which academics for two millennia have thought to be impossible – are being encouraged by a prominent US mathematical research organization to submit their work to a peer-reviewed journal.
Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson, who are students of St Mary’s Academy, recently gave a presentation of their findings at the American Mathematical Society south-eastern chapter’s semi-annual meeting in Georgia.
Continue reading...Prime minister urges public to judge him on whether he delivers on new pledges but Labour says most ‘were happening anyway’. This blog is now closed
Lucy Powell, the shadow culture secretary, has issued a statement welcoming the government’s proposal to abandon the privatisation of Channel (without actually putting it in those terms). She says the government should never have floated the plan in the first place, and that it has been a “total distraction” for the broadcaster. She says:
The Conservatives’ vendetta against Channel 4 was always wrong for Britain, growth in our creative economy, and a complete waste of everyone’s time.
Our broadcasting and creative industries lead the world, yet this government has hamstrung them for the last year with the total distraction of Channel 4 privatisation.
Continue reading...As Australia slips down in global rankings, maths experts are divided on which teaching method is best for students
Australia’s sliding mathematics ranking and disagreements around how the subject should be taught remain key sticking points preventing a consensus on the proposed national curriculum.
The nation’s eduction ministers met earlier this month to discuss the proposed curriculum and almost reached a consensus, but while most of the state and territories were happy with the latest revisions, the federal and Western Australian education ministers held out.
Continue reading...The calculations behind filling supermarket shelves are dizzyingly complex – but it all starts with the x and y you know from school
Nando’s put it succinctly on its Twitter feed last month: “The UK supply chain is having a bit of a mare right now.” Getting things on to supermarket shelves, through your letterbox or into a restaurant kitchen has certainly become problematic of late. It’s hard to know exactly where to pin the blame, though Covid and Brexit have surely played a part. What we can do is give thanks for algebra, because things would be so much worse without it.
It’s likely that you have mixed feelings about algebra. Even if you could knuckle down and manage it in school, you probably wondered why it was important to solve an equation involving x raised to the power of 2 or why you should want to find a and b when a + b = 3 and 2a – b = 12. You might even feel that your scepticism has been vindicated: the chances are that you have never done algebra in your post-school life. But that doesn’t mean that the jumble of letters, numbers and missing things that we call algebra is useless. Whether it’s supermarket groceries, a new TV or a parcel from Aunt Emily, they all reach your home through some attempt to solve an equation and find the missing number. Algebra is the maths that delivers.
Continue reading...The famous number has many practical uses, mathematicians say, but is it really worth the time and effort to work out its trillions of digits?
Swiss researchers have spent 108 days calculating pi to a new record accuracy of 62.8tn digits.
Using a computer, their approximation beat the previous world record of 50tn decimal places, and was calculated 3.5 times as quickly. It’s an impressive and time-consuming feat that begs the question: why?
Continue reading...Supercomputer calculation took 108 days and nine hours – 3.5 times as fast as previous record
Swiss researchers have calculated the mathematical constant pi to a new world-record level of exactitude, hitting 62.8tn figures using a supercomputer.
“The calculation took 108 days and nine hours,” the Graubuenden University of Applied Sciences said in a statement.
Continue reading...There’s been much debate about lateral flow tests – their accuracy depends on context and the theories of a 18th-century cleric
Maths quiz. If you take a Covid test that only gives a false positive one time in every 1,000, what’s the chance that you’ve actually got Covid? Surely it’s 99.9%, right?
No! The correct answer is: you have no idea. You don’t have enough information to make the judgment.
Continue reading...The response to Covid-19 has been momentous but discoveries in AI, diet, conservation, space and beyond, show the power of science to improve the world post-pandemic
In 2020 the race to space changed gear. The May launch of the SpaceX vehicle Crew Dragon was the first time a private vehicle had delivered astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). It was deeply impressive, but also featureless… sleek, white inner walls replaced the complex instrument panels of old, and it was clear that the two test pilots on board were mostly passengers, with no direct control over the flight. In November, Crew Dragon became the first private spacecraft fully certified by Nasa to transport humans to the ISS and later that month delivered four astronauts to the orbiting station. This taxi may not be cheap, but it’s here to stay and it’s a game-changer.
Continue reading...The Australian mathematician Samuel Blake describes how he and and two other cryptologists finally solved an encrypted message written by the unnamed serial killer 51 years ago.
The FBI confirmed the code, cracked with help from a supercomputer called Spartan, is accurate, but they said it did not help with identification
Continue reading...Martin Hairer takes $3m Breakthrough prize for work a colleague said must have been done by aliens
A mathematician who tamed a nightmarish family of equations that behave so badly they make no sense has won the most lucrative prize in academia.
Martin Hairer, an Austrian-British researcher at Imperial College London, is the winner of the 2021 Breakthrough prize for mathematics, an annual $3m (£2.3m) award that has come to rival the Nobels in terms of kudos and prestige.
Continue reading...Johnson overcame racial and gender-based discrimination to become an integral part of Nasa’s work in space exploration
Katherine Johnson, one of the trailblazing African American mathematicians whose story was told in the hit film Hidden Figures, has died, Nasa announced on Monday. She was 101.
Related: How history forgot the black women behind Nasa’s space race
Continue reading...Exclusive: Hannah Fry says ethical pledge needed in tech fields that will shape future
Mathematicians, computer engineers and scientists in related fields should take a Hippocratic oath to protect the public from powerful new technologies under development in laboratories and tech firms, a leading researcher has said.
The ethical pledge would commit scientists to think deeply about the possible applications of their work and compel them to pursue only those that, at the least, do no harm to society.
Continue reading...