KEY POINTS:
Anybody who's ever made their fingers do the nine times table knows that numbers can be fun. Put any number into a calculator and keep tapping the square root key and before long you get "1". Spooky. All those "take away the number you first thought of" games. Ditto.
If you really pay attention in arithmetic lessons, you can probably win a few bucks from the gullible at the barbecue. But is maths sexy? Never.
All the kids at school who were good at maths had four-colour ballpoints and graph-paper exercise books covered with equations and Marmite. The sexy ones were in the football and netball teams. The maths geeks now run multi-national software firms while the erstwhile sports stars are on ACC or the DPB. But that doesn't mean maths is sexy.
But that's the image they are trying to cultivate at the University of Auckland. Alarmed by the worldwide decline in maths majors they are renaming courses to make them more attractive. Department head Associate Professor Bill Barton reckoned "Mathematics 5" is a "classic example" of a course name that "doesn't tell you a single thing". But even that First XV captain can deduce that it follows Mathematics 4 and precedes Mathematics 6. If a mathematician can't, he's in the wrong job.
The university is changing the name of Introduction to Applied and Computational Mathematics to the alluring Modelling and Computation. Likewise, Advanced Methods in Applied Mathematics A becomes the positively passionate Partial Differential Equations.
Pardon us, but that doesn't really do it for us non-geeks. How about "Numbers to watch girls by"? Or "Will he call? Calculating the probability"? That should pack them in.
