© Pierre Maré,
2004 - 2007
Offbeat 133
I hated numbers at school. It all started well enough in the first three years. Double digit addition and subtraction were a minor challenge, but nothing that could stop me in my tracks. By Grade 4, or Standard 2 as it was then known, I got bored and fell behind.
Standards 3 and 4 brought a nightmare into my life in the form of a power-hungry bully with everything to prove and a group of terrified pre-adolescents with whom he could assert his might. At that point things really started to go backwards. Fractions, sets and long division became a meaningless jumble in the nauseous haze of daily terror.
Later grades brought adolescent bravado. I discarded groundless fears, filled the gap with macho contempt, and made my way through the years as an underachiever, though I took secret pride for just a few minutes at being the only one to recognise a quadratic equation cunningly hidden in the beat-poetry jumble of a string of trigonometric shorthand. And there was quite a bit of strange pleasure to be had in the basic elegance of the whole business of the square on the hypotenuse.
University changed all that. Faced with the prospect of conscription which apparently would make a man of me, I decided to stay at varsity for as long as possible and let my testosterone develop naturally without the assistance of guns, marching and blind obedience.
The only problem I had was that the double entry system, the basic requirement for my chosen second major, accountancy, eluded me as naturally as a bar of soap on the floor of a shower, and the one thing that I seemed to have a knack for was calculus. Statistics became my second major and maths became my buddy. History and a uniform passed me by: the numbers stuck like chewing gum in hair.
It has been almost two decades since I last strung out the numbers and engaged in the strangely symmetric pleasure of inverting a matrix, but I can still draw on the sense of peace that I felt at those times.
I don't have any regrets at not finding numbers earlier in life: every bit of school-yard hatred and contempt was survival, be it right or wrong, But I am glad I found them since and can toy with them and use them now.
Numbers and mathematics are unjustly maligned and boxed in to the realm of the inscrutable. We are expected to be proficient at communication and languages, but with all the terror of the superficial complexity of algebra, we deny ourselves and our children the only language that can be used to quantify reality.
Can numbers be beautiful? Consider this... a study of beauty once found that the greater the degree of symmetry between the two sides of the face, the greater the chance of that individual being seen as beautiful. Now consider this... 7 = 4. And this... 2 = 2. Like aesthetic reality, numbers can be ugly if they are wrong, and beautiful when they are true.
How can numbers be peaceful? The next time you feel the anger rise from the acid pit of your belly to the dark depths of your throat, count the numbers from one to ten, and if that doesn't work, try the sum of three eighths of each of the squares of the numbers from one to ten. If the first exercise doesn't work, the second will take your mind off things long enough for you to lose the heat.
Beyond the standard numbers that seek to find order and symmetry, there are relatively new numbers, once known as limit theory but now known as chaos theory, that seek to describe change, unpredictability and the effect of the smallest possible variables, such as the now well-known butterfly that causes a very theoretical hurricane by flapping its wings gently on a calm day, an ocean away.
Aside from that, even if you are an artist, unsullied by anything as demeaning as numbers, you still need a basis for working out the price on your masterpiece.
So what's the moral of the story? If your child comes home with a fear of maths, find the source of the fears and remove it with a baseball bat. The law may not forgive you, but God may turn a blind eye.
