National Maths Day.

 National Maths Day.

Against a miserable backdrop of barbaric murder on quite the most colossal scale, deaths by the hundreds and thousands in beleaguered Ukraine, the cost of living crisis and the now well publicised tomato, pepper and general fruit shortages, Britain may well think that there's no light at the end of the tunnel. In fact if you were to believe half of the well documented issues on the news agenda you'd be forgiven for thinking that the world has quite clearly fallen apart and there's nothing to look forward to. 

This morning parts of Britain woke up to find that the nation is knee deep in snow and that winter, effectively drawing to a close, is still with us. The wintry skies are still hovering above the nation, the motorway gritters will inevitably make their presence felt and we'll be aghast or delighted at its unexpected appearance a couple of weeks before the first day of spring. The kids will still go to school - or at least a vast majority of them, we'll all be at work, college or university busily engaging in important meetings. Then we'll be frantically rushing around the office searching for paper clips, missing documents and pens and pencils that are now slowly being replaced by computers all the while pre-occupied in the business of the day.

And that's where today's  National Day finds its relevance and resonance. Today Ladies and Gentlemen it's National Maths Day. Now who would have thought of that? Of course its National Women's Day but that's a wonderful coincidence because the proportion of women maths professors and lecturers must be as high as their male counterparts. You must have read about in all of those journals and magazines that frequently refer to bewildering statistics, demographics, percentages and extensive market research campaigns.

National Maths Day, in any context, would seem to be a peculiar topic of discussion since some of us simply didn't understand about the basic mechanics of maths, the innumerable columns  of figures on spread sheet data and the blank face you immediately assume because it just doesn't seem to make any sense at all. But decades after leaving school, maths still seems to surplus to requirements because it was a subject fraught with nightmarish complexities. How were you expected to understand maths since maths felt like an incomprehensible puzzle, a language completely unfathomable and simply a mystery.

But to those who found maths to be a piece of cake, a straightforward matter of simple addition, multiplication and division then maybe you should have been listening more intently. And yet even now maths just leaves you cold, despairing and totally flummoxed. Firstly, there were those mind blowing calculations that constitute your weekly shopping bill, the price of manufactured goods, and the numbers and figures that didn't really add up even though you've spent the best part of an hour scratching your heads almost indefinitely.

You can still remember that first agonising reference book on logarithms, algorithms, cosines and angles, then quantum physics if you were remarkably intelligent and wanted to move on to bigger and better things. Then you shuffled back to your seat, head still buried in utter confusion, bewilderment, disillusion and wondering why on earth you had to be roped into doing something that gave you no pleasure at all and counting down the hours before school was out.  

In theory though maths should be regarded as a fundamental part of education, an essential tool to have when the bills drop through your letter box and somebody tells you that the extortionate price of car insurance beggars belief. Then, quite pertinently, most of us have had to tighten the proverbial belt because the mortgage has to be paid, the children still need school uniform and then there are the vital necessities such as food or drink, clothing, furniture and all of those electronic gadgets seen in every conceivable environment. Today's kids, you suspect, would be completely lost without them since they're just indispensable and besides they'd kick up an enormous fuss if they weren't there anymore.

So it is that we go about our everyday living with maths as some private accompaniment to our busy lifestyle. During the 1970s every electrical shop throughout the land stocked the calculator, a snazzy piece of equipment still in fashion but then the most crucial accessory to have. If you wanted to be an accountant, economist or at the very heart of the banking industry, an 'O' Level and 'A' Level in Maths was a foremost priority. Besides, if you couldn't add up, work out a seemingly complicated balance sheet or do the sums and equations, then you couldn't hope to make your way in the world.

On personal reflection maths just gives you a guilty complex if only because the world is all about costs, the criminally expensive price of bread and milk and you haven't got a clue at times. Shame on me. Your abiding memory of maths is of an excruciatingly painful period or two periods of time during the day when nothing of any substance would happen at all. You felt as though time had been recklessly wasted mentally wrestling with a meaningless experience. 

So there you are folks. It's National Maths Day. It's time to close your books, put down your pens and pencils, ponder over another set of graphs or tables and pretend you were doing something infinitely more rewarding. Your uncle once told you that maths was all about logic and commonsense but to this day it all seems like some scientific formula that was just beyond us. Now where's that calculator again? You've probably left it in cupboard or chest of drawers where none should ever be able to find it. National Maths Day. Now there's a conundrum.