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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