MATHS READING - WHY WE NEED PYTHAGORAS (WHAT DOES LILY ALLEN KNOW?)
Lily Allen gave a voice to bored schoolchildren everywhere this week when she posted on Twitter to moan about Pythagoras’s theorem. “I left school 15 years ago and I’ve not used Pythagoras’s theorem once or even seen a Bunsen burner,” she complained. But before the back rows of maths classes across the country start cheering, she suggested some even more boring lessons. 'Are they teaching children about how mortgages work, national insurance or how to fill out a self-assessment tax return yet?'
Education minister Nick Gibb quickly stepped in to admonish Allen. 'Not everyone’s lucky enough to have a job like yours,' he sniffed. 'For many people maths and science are crucial to their career & life chances.'
Does Allen have a point? Is knowing that the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides really a lesson everyone needs to learn?
And would a world without the Greek mathematician’s ideas 'be unthinkable because there’d be no Dairylea and no way of starting snooker,' as TV philosopher Philomena Cunk once wondered.
Author and broadcaster Alex Bellos says it is like asking whether Shakespeare is useful in everyday life. 'This is a basic building block of maths. If you study any kind of science, you will need to know it. The very first, and most important, maths book is Euclid’s Elements and this is the grand finale of that book – it’s one of the greatest achievements of Greek geometry.
'It’s been crucial to the construction industry since the ancient Egyptians. And it is used in every GPS system.'
Matt Parker, public engagement in maths fellow at Queen Mary University of London, says Allen herself is indebted to the theorem, because without it we could not record or download digital music. “Pythagoras’s theorem allows you to calculate the distance between two points. At school, we learn about this on a flat bit of paper. In more advanced lessons, you do it in 3D – looking at the diagonal of a cube. When we do it with data it is in more dimensions than we can visualise, but it is the same calculation – and one that we can use to reverse errors in information that is sent.
'When you send data electronically you need to ensure there are no mistakes in it – if you download a song, you don’t want bits missing. Computer programmers take data and imagine them as points in space. Pythagoras’s theorem is a way of calculating if there is any corruption in the data, by calculating if these points are where they should be.'
Everyone from video-game designers to solar physicists rely on the theorem, says Parker. But even if you never come across a right-angled triangle you want to calculate the hypotenuse of, that doesn’t mean your time has been wasted. “Maths is about thinking skills and problem solving. The content is not the most important thing. It’s learning a series of techniques to solve a problem and then applying them to a new problem. To work out a mortgage, you need to use numerical and analytical logic skills you learned in a different situation and apply them here.
'We are teaching students how to acquire and apply new problem-solving skills. And for some people – who go into a technical career – this will be very relevant.'
Bellos agrees. 'You don’t know which 10-year-olds are going to go on to be scientists. So, yes, everyone needs to learn it.' (Khaleeli, 2016).
REFERENCE
Khaleeli, H. (2016) 'GPS, construction and video games - everyday uses for Pythagoras's theorem', The Guardian [Online]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/science/shortcuts/2016/feb/10/gps-construction-and-video-games-everyday-uses-for-pythagorass-theorem (Accessed 12 February 2016).
Khaleeli, H. (2016) 'GPS, construction and video games - everyday uses for Pythagoras's theorem', The Guardian [Online]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/science/shortcuts/2016/feb/10/gps-construction-and-video-games-everyday-uses-for-pythagorass-theorem (Accessed 12 February 2016).
