A recent unofficial survey revealed that around 70% of the worlds schoolchildren claimed to “hate maths”. A quick search on social network sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo and I uncovered dozens of groups dedicated to anti-maths sentiment, with a combined membership of thousands of people. Here in Ireland, Maths has the highest failure rate of any subject at school-leaving level. Why does mathemathics seem to inspire fear and intimidation in students around the world? What is it about this subject that reduces the linguistically gifted and the musically adept to tears of frustration?

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Of course, everyone has their strengths and weaknesses at school. Some excel at languages, others art or music. Some of us find our niche in history or geography, and others feel at home in the chemistry lab or the gym. There are very few Renaissance men or women in our ranks, all-rounders who refuse to restrict themselves to one area. For the most part we pick and choose our favourite subjects, based on what comes easy to us. And many of us decide that maths is not for us, that we will never grasp it, and we cave in.

Throughout my academic life, I have had a conflicted relationship with numbers and symbols. My marks have swung from the occasional A grade to the dreaded D, or worse. I spent a lot of time wondering why I disliked maths (time which probably should have been spent doing homework).  The strange thing was, I had a good teacher. I continued learning maths at the highest level there was, miraculously scraping by each time.

One of the things about maths that irked me was it’s sneakiness. Math wanted to trick you. It wanted to get the better of you. It sent you down avenues that would give you invalid answers, and then you had to start again using another method. Math also confused me because it wasn’t words. Call me arrogant, but I’ve always been able to sort of make stuff up when armed with language, words, phrases. People would say “Well, at least there is only one answer in math”. I thought, “Yes, but what if the question is asked in a language you understand?”. Maths was stoic, cold, hostile. It didn’t care for your opinions – it wanted the truth.

Yet, even when I struggled with maths, spent hours poring over questions that made little sense to me, I  knew there was something in maths that I actually liked. Why else had I chosen to study it at the highest level possible? Perverse as it sounds, I thought maths was beautiful. Theoretical systems that worked seamlessly, elegant cosmic machines that calculated the laws of the universe, the flawless, intricate sequences of nature, …maths is the purest, most perfect science of all. Physics is applied maths, chemistry is applied physics, biology is applied chemistry and psychology is applied biology! Mathematics is distilled knowledge. And it frustrated me every day I opened that textbook to know that I would never inhabit that world.

I believe much of the difficulties students experience with maths stems from the way it is taught – you don’t learn enough maths to master any of the lofty applications listed above, yet you’re taught far more than is necessary in everyday life! No wonder people tire of trigonometry, complex numbers and calculus – what are they supposed to do with it?!

There is also a kind of stigma attached to maths – the argument that”logic” is pitted against creativity, the left side of the brain versus the right, mathematically capable as opposed to musically or artistically gifted. Of course, this argument does not stand up when one considers the level of maths used in painting – Renaissance artists used precise calculations to work out perspective and proportions in their work. Architecture, sculpture and design are all artistic areas highly dependant on numbers and logic. Indeed, music too has long been associated with maths. Greek philosopher Pythagoras is quoted as saying “There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres”. The famous mathematician Gottfried Leibniz once said “Music is the pleasure the human soul experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting”.

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So, typically for me, I have not found that one true answer to the question. If only there were a formula we could follow that would tell us why we hate maths so much…then again, we probably wouldn’t understand it anyway! I do know however that maths is a beautiful, worthwhile field of study and I envy those to whom it is second nature. I can only hope that the next generation of schoolchildren will come that bit closer to understanding the subject than the last, and thus that bit closer to understanding The Universe.