While being kept awake on Saturday night by drunk, singing rugby fans, I found myself asking: why is sport important? Not why is it fun to watch, but why do we take it so seriously? The answers I came up with were pretty standard and not all that interesting: because it's the best competing with the best, the sportsmen and women are pushing themselves to incredible feats of achievement, makes your country proud etc etc. I am not remotely interested in sport but I decided that sports fans had a point, but please could they stop singing now.
However, watching Beautiful Young Minds, a documentary about young maths geniuses competing at the International Maths Olympiad, I had to ask myself, why don't we care as much about this as we do about sport? These kids are incredibly talented - in fact I've done maths and I've played football and I'd say I am more likely to represent my country at the latter than at the former, and this is from a girl who can't do a header without closing her eyes. They are pushing themselves to incredible feats of achievement. They make our country proud. But we have never heard of any of them. Name some great living mathematicians.
One answer is of course that rugby is more fun to watch than maths. Fair enough. But another is that these children are the type to be bullied and ostracised at school: overwhelmingly intelligent, cripplingly awkward and shy, a high level of autism spectrum disorders etc. One of the boys in the documentary one a silver medal at the Maths Olympiad, a goal he had been working towards his whole life, and he was too shy to go on stage to get his medal. In short, we don't like them, so we don't aspire to be like them, and we are not interested in their achievements. But why does the fact that they are not social successes mean that we can't celebrate what they can do? We certainly have no problem adoring stupid sportsmen who can barely hold a conversation.
Poignantly, the aforementioned boy who wouldn't go onto the stage was talking about how much he prefered life in China, where his "different" behaviour was explained by everyone there as just because of him being a foreigner. In China, he told us, it's considered a good thing to be intelligent, and if you are exceptional at maths that is considered cool. So why in this country are we so quick to celebrate sporting achievement and sneer at intellectual achievement? Just because it's "geeky"? Bad answer.
This blog loves maths geeks. And suspects that it wouldn't exist without them. The Woman Who Talked Too Much, officially backing the UK at the 2008 International Maths Olympiad!
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8 comments:
I also watched this - somewhat against my expectations at the start as I feared a version of the 'freakshow TV' approach that Five has often used for similar subjects.
It was actually remarkably moving and elegantly told. Additionally, thanks to way in which those on the autistic spectrum will often field questions which otherwise might be deemed a tad insensitive or provocative, there were some very tender insights into the priorities some of the boys gave to their actions and other people's reactions.
As alienating as Jos may have appeared, you couldn't help but feel for his efforts and his inability to express or process certain emotions. And Daniel - the boy who just could not get on stage to receive his accolades - was one of the most eloquent characters of the programme for all his difficulties.
We do very little in the UK to really treasure and promote maths skills (as a Hums grad I am regularly ashamed at how myself and others are inept at even the most basic maths tasks). Thankfully, lovely partner is a maths geek (as well as a Hums geek too) so I can get regularly bought to earth on topics such as the Maths Olympiad.
Wonderful programme; wonderful review Marie.
I thought it was a good programme, I just feel sorry for them, as awkward as they are now, what are they going to be like as adults?
I missed it. Damn.
One of my few claims to fame - although as you point out, fame doesn't come with it - is that I got a gold award in the British Physics Olympiad back in 1990. I screwed up the practical though (it was seven hours long!) so I never went International. I'm still friends with one of my fellow finalists, who was also a Maths Olympiad finalist and still does team coaching (he's a professor at Stanford now).
So what else do we end up doing afterwards, apart from being professors? Media journalism, it turns out. Do I need maths for that? I had to do some simultaneous equations for my blog this morning, which was nice.
Wow... Rob, I mean, WOW!
I second those wows... No wonder you get a tad frustrated with the woeful science in Doctor Who.
Rob, you do realise that you're better qualified to work on The Engineer than anyone who works on The Engineer, don't you?
Aw, shucks! You're all being so nice when these days I can barely string two equations together. Plus it doesn't go down well if you bring it up at parties, so it's not that useful, really. I still have the graphing calculator and small volumette of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that I won, if it anyone's interested, though.
Is that tumbleweed I just saw roll by?
As for bendings of the laws of physics in Doctor Who, I think we have to accept that with the territory, even though they do say science is golden.
Man, that's some gentle comedy, Rob.
As for the engineering thing, I can't really build or design anything worthwhile with my special skills, and judging by the attempts made by certain engineer students I knew at university to convince me that there were only 24 combinations on a four-wheel combination lock ("It's 4! - it says so in the table book"), maths/physics skills aren't really that necessary to engineering. I might be wrong there, though.
Was that a job offer, Stu_N?
he was called daniel lightwing - isn't that a fantastic name?
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