22 February 2018
McGovern’s Law
The new maths.
By Chin Chin
It cost me a night’s sleep, that terrible story about education minister, Nick Gibb, who refused to multiply 9 by 8 when asked to do so by Jeremy Kyle on live television. He may have been criticised for his decision, but imagine what would have happened if he had accepted the challenge. Either he would have got it wrong, which would have been hugely embarrassing (remember George W’s spelling of the word “potato”, and he was not even involved in setting a test for schoolchildren) or he would have got it right, his willingness to participate exposing him to further tests. “Right, Minister, what was the date of the Great Fire of London?” Then would have followed the French for “the pen of my aunt” and requests to name the capital of Albania and the victor of Blenheim. Sooner or later it would have gone wrong.
Still, it wasn’t the mess which the minister might have found himself in which kept me awake, but rather the alarming discovery that there is a major gap in my own understanding of basic arithmetic, a gap exposed by the brilliant Alison McGovern, MP for the Wirral, ex-head girl of a distinguished grammar school and a graduate of University College, London. Commenting on Mr Gibb’s decision, she tweeted:
“Seriously though, Nick Gibb. Times tables? Is it 1950? What about kids learning the logic of maths, so they can work things out for themselves?”
So that’s it then. Tables are done. The modern child should learn the logic of maths, so that it can do sums of this sort without relying on rote learning. The frightening thing was that I didn’t know what logic she was talking about, making me a sort of “beyond dinosaur” who not only used antiquated methods, but didn’t realise that there was something better and more modern. A situation like this could not be allowed to last so I sought expert help. Where better to find it than in the public bar of The Crown, a place which boasts experts on every possible subject?
“Right then, I need your help,” I told the assembled company. It included a couple of actuaries and a chartered account, so they should know a bit about arithmetic. “What’s this new method that Alison knows about for multiplying eight and nine?” The question was met with something of a silence, but, at least in the Crown, nature abhors a silence, so after a bit someone piped up in the corner.
“It’s quite simple,” he said. “If you put nine dots in a row across a piece of paper and seven similar rows beneath, you only have to count the total number of dots to get the answer.” That seemed a brilliant method to me, but the accountant disagreed.
“That wouldn’t work very well if it was part of some bigger computation, like 29×8,” he observed. “You would end up surrounded by bits of paper, all covered with dots, and anyway it would be very slow. A better system is to do it on your fingers and thumbs.”
“But I’ve got ten of those not eight or nine,” interrupted the actuary.
“Then you could carry black plastic sheathes in your pocket and put one over a thumb when you are multiplying by nine and one over each thumb when you are multiplying by eight, ” replied the accountant, perhaps miffed at his idea being challenged.
“Plastic sheathes! You couldn’t use those in a Royal Palace,” put in the other actuary. There followed a debate as to the likelihood of the accountant being summoned to do sums in a royal palace.
After that the assembled company continued its search for Alison’s method. Could it be that she favoured multiplying 8 by 10 and then deducting 8 from the result? That would certainly give the right answer but as a method would become ever more complex as the multiples worked away from ten. Think as we might, we could not discover the McGovern system and, after a bit, we wondered whether anyone else had either. There was a potential for disaster here. Unless she wrote it down at once, the nation would be at risk of losing it if Alison died – Fermat’s last theorem all over again. Should the Treasury take some form of insurance policy on her life?
But the real concern was that the emperor had no clothes and that her tweet was vacuous nonsense. What could have possessed her to publish it? It is true that her degree is in philosophy rather than maths, but the names Descartes, Pascal and Russell themselves stand warranty that the two disciplines run side-by-side. It is unlikely, then, that she is the victim of some fundamental mathematical mistake. The second possibility is that the tweet was sent with no thought at all, a Trumpian reaction to the possible discomfiture of a political opponent. In the frenzy of modern politics such tweets are becoming increasingly common, so perhaps she could be forgiven for succumbing to a growing if empty-headed trend. Yes, it must be right that we forgive her this time, but with a request that she thinks about things a little more carefully before she tweets again.
