I heard a quick two minute talk recently on a web site that I strongly recommend everyone access every now and then. www.ted.com is a website that keeps a video record of the speeches and presentations given by the world’s leading thinkers. The presentation given by the American mathematician, Arthur Benjamin. Simply argues we need to review the maths thought in schools today

Benjamin suggests that the type of maths taught in schools, world wide, is not leading to the understanding necessary to recognise or deal with the problems being experienced at the moment and the hazy world future that lies ahead. Benjamin argued that the maths curriculum we have is based on a foundation of arithmetic and algebra and everything we learn after that is building up towards understanding only one branch of maths, calculus. This he suggests is wrong, the maths of statistics and probability is of far more relevance to peoples lives. Benjamin argues that “the reality is that very few people use calculus in a conscious meaning full way in their day to day lives. On the other hand statistics is a subject that one could and should use, on a daily basis, “its risk, its reward, its randomness, it’s understanding data” I believe that if probability and statistics were understood by those who work in the property sector we would not be in the economic mess that we are in today.

“If this subject is taught properly it could be a lot of fun. Probability and statistics is the maths of games and gambling. Its analysing trends, it’s predicting the future. The world has changed from analogue to digital and it is time for our maths to change to analogue to digital. From the more classical continuous maths to the more modern discrete maths, the maths of uncertainty, randomness and data probability and statistics. Instead of students learning about the techniques of calculus it would be far more significant what two standard deviations from a mean means”

What Mr Benjamin has said has relevance to me because I have studied statistics and probability. The benefit of plotting events in space and time on a graph and assessing the probability of such events occurring is a very valuable tool. It answers questions but is instrumental in providing the information necessary in the creation of the right questions to ask . It has been said that one of the flaws with our education system is that we teach the next generation how to answer questions rather than teach them how to ask them .The right question is the question that leads to a new a relevant answer. This is the key. There is a graph of word human population growth that quite simply frightens me. This shows a process out of control where there is an exponential expansion of events that is unsustainable. In other animal populations where such an expansion occurs the cause of the expansion is consumed and as a consequence there is an equally dramatic reduction in numbers. Perhaps we,, as a more ‘intelligent’ animal, wont suffer that fate but the probability is we will.