The numbers game
Despite being a key subject in schools, maths has been a bit neglected in museums. But this is changing, as Rebecca Atkinson reports
The joke goes that there are three types of people in this world: those who can do maths and those who can’t. Many of us will -happily boast that we fall into the latter category because in the UK maths is one of those -subjects people love to hate.
“The cliche is that you go to a party and tell someone you’re a mathematician; there’s a pregnant pause and suddenly that person needs to get another drink,” says June -Barrow-Green, a member of the London Mathematical Society’s governing council.
“People assume that maths isn’t for them and it’s become acceptable to give up on maths altogether.”
The reasons for society’s maths phobia are debatable, but many put it down to the way the subject is taught in schools, a lack of understanding about its application in the real world and the perception that it is simply too hard for the majority of us to master.
Museums are in a unique position to help change negative attitudes towards maths, yet the subject remains largely absent from museums in the UK and, unlike in the US and many European countries, there is no dedicated maths museum here.
“There is potential to show maths in most museum objects, from ancient remains to modern art, but we don’t,” says Alexandra Fitzsimmons, a content and storytelling consultant and founder of educational -charity Maths on Toast.
“The amazing thing that museums do is help people see things in a different way or from a new perspective, but this hasn’t been the case for maths.”
Part of the challenge for museums is how to bring maths alive and show its relevance to visitors in a gallery setting.
In September, the Science Museum in London announced that it had received a £5m donation from the philanthropists David and Claudia Harding for the development of a new maths gallery, which will be designed by the architect Zaha Hadid.
Dedicated maths gallery
The gallery won’t be open for another two years, but it is part of a wider strategy to introduce more maths across the museum.
The curator of the gallery, David Rooney, who previously led the delivery of the Science Museum’s Codebreaker exhibition about the life of Alan Turing, says it will be historical and will explore “the mathematical practice that underpins everything in the modern world”.
To ensure the right stories are told (Rooney is not a mathematician), an advisory panel of experts will be set up to meet twice a year to give feedback. The museum will also host its first mathematician-in--residence – Thomas Woolley from the University of Oxford.
“Our approach won’t be to start with maths, which many people would find off-putting, but instead to look at all the things that maths underpins, such as aviation, money, medicine and so on,” Rooney says.
“Our collection can help reveal how mathematical practice underpins timeless themes that are relevant to everyone, such as life and death, trade and travel, work and play. This won’t be an encyclopaedia of the history of maths; it will be an edited selection of narratives about people, objects and principles. We want to avoid having a corner dedicated to ‘women in maths’ or non-western contributions – these will be stories threaded across the displays.”
By focusing on these narratives, the Science Museum hopes to get people to recognise maths as more than just arithmetic and to value its contribution to the world.
A new approach
This is different to the hands-on and interactive approach used in specialist museums, such as MoMath, the national museum of mathematics in New York, and science centres such as At-Bristol and Techniquest in the UK.
“The displays have to work for our 3.4 million visitors; some may be mathematicians but many won’t be experts,” Rooney says. “Some of the hands-on maths displays I’ve seen [in other museums] are internal presentations of maths – it’s hard to see how they relate to the real world.
“Likewise, with purely collection-based displays it can be quite hard to see the life around the use of those objects. With the Turing exhibition, we told a biographical and emotional story that aimed to inspire people to find out more about the maths. But maths wasn’t in the way of the story.”
Geoff Wain and Margaret Brown, both retired mathematics education professors, are the co-chairs of MathsWorld UK, a charity that wants to build the UK’s first dedicated maths museum. Although it has yet to find a home or funding, the vision for the museum is similar to the Science -Museum’s: to explore what maths means to modern society.
But rather than using artefacts to tell the history of maths, MathsWorld UK wants to change the perception of maths through an entirely interactive experience aimed at children and adults.
“Historical artefacts aren’t going to turn people on to maths,” Brown says. “We’ve also got to get away from maths being about solving equations or doing calculations – we want to excite people and demonstrate how important maths is.”
Introducing the subject into displays may be a challenge, but for many museums the real potential of maths lies in their education and learning work, and there is an increasing focus on Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects in school national -curriculums.
Fitzsimmons says the new maths curriculum in England sets out an ambition for teachers to get students more excited about maths and to see its creative potential.
“It also includes lots of stuff that students have to know, but doesn’t explain how to match the two together,” she says. “The opportunity for museums is to help teachers make that link and provide them with resources they can use in the classroom.”
Wolverhampton Art Gallery introduced its maths in museums workshops in 2013 in anticipation of changes to the national curriculum.
“We were worried that schools might not visit because art wasn’t a core subject,” says Tess Radcliffe, the museum’s learning and community engagement manager.
“So we introduced a more inter-disciplinary approach, including literacy and science, but for us maths is huge because there are such strong links in the collection – for example, Islamic art, pop art and works from the Enlightenment.
“It’s early days, but we’ve found that learning simple maths through art appeals to children, especially those who struggle with the way maths is taught in schools.”
The workshops are mainly used by primary schools, where teachers are often not maths specialists, but Radcliffe says that it is a challenge to get secondary schools interested. This is probably because of time pressures on secondary school teachers as well as a lack of awareness that such workshops exist.
“There’s also a perception that there is a disconnect between ‘exciting’ or creative maths and what pupils need to learn to pass a test,” Fitzsimmons says. “So museums need to be explicit about what the links are to the curriculum.”
Rethinking maths
Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, which tells the story of codebreaking and intelligence during the second world war, has had lots of success with its education programme. Thomas Briggs, its education officer, is a former maths teacher whose role is to go to schools to teach them about codebreaking.
“Most of the people who book me are maths rather than history teachers, and I would like to do more cross-curricula activity to reach people who are ‘not into maths’,” he says.
“It can be challenging as teachers don’t always see what maths is. Real-life maths is not always seen as maths. For me, it’s about showing that maths is the application of what you learn in the classroom – it’s not just writing symbols on a page, it’s the reason we do that.”
Interest in codebreaking and mathematics is expected to increase following the release of The Imitation Game, a film about the breaking of the Enigma code and starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing.
The media attention around the award of the Fields Medal – described as the Nobel prize for mathematics – to its first female winner, Maryam Mirzakhani, also suggests that maths may be making the transition from a subject we loath to something that we should be celebrating.
If maths is having something of a moment, then the time could be ripe for museums to relook at their displays and education programmes – something institutions such as Wolverhampton Art Gallery and the Thackray Medical Museum in Leeds are already doing.
“As a society we are closed-minded when it comes to maths,” Briggs says. “People will happily say they don’t like maths and can’t do it, in a way that they never would about being able to write their own name.
“I want museums to take a lead and start to show maths and how it relates to the real world. They are in an ideal position to say to people ‘what you think you know about maths, think again’.”
Funding for maths projects in museums is a challenge, although the Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) agenda does provide some opportunities.
Penny Fidler, the chief executive of the UK Association for Science and Discovery Centres, which represents more than 60 institutions in the UK, says science centres have struggled to secure lottery funding for capital projects, instead relying on grants from the likes of the Wellcome Trust.
Private investment from businesses that have an interest in cultivating maths skills – from technology or engineering firms to banks – have already proved fruitful for museums.
Last year, the National Maritime Museum in London was part-funded by investment firm Winton Capital to run Maths and Beyond, a programme of workshops, masterclasses and planetary shows for key stage 3 students.
Other foundations that mention numeracy as key aims include the Ernest Cook Trust, the Mercers Company and the Rayne Foundation.
The Science in Society fund, which is managed by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, offers financial support to individuals and organisations to create and run pilot projects that take science subjects to diverse audiences.
Rebecca Atkinson
As the home of world war two codebreaking, Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes has maths at its heart.
“Part of our USP is that there are few heritage sites that have problem-solving and maths at their core,” says Victoria Worpole, the director of learning and collections at Bletchley Park.
“Many of the people who worked here were mathematicians and they used their skills in a way that was relevant to society at the time. We want people to understand that those skills are still relevant now.”
Even though you don’t have to be a mathematician to be a codebreaker, a lot of those who worked at Bletchley Park were. They included Alan Turing, a mathematician and the pioneer of modern-day computing.
Bletchley Park recently appointed a Turing education officer, Joanna Shelton, who is reworking the museum’s schools programme. There is a strong emphasis on maths, codebreaking and Stem subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).
Among the other maths activities at the museum is a series of family workshops organised with Maths on Toast, an organisation that runs community maths events for families.
Bletchley Park is also part of the local maths hub. These hubs are part of an £11m government programme to support the teaching of maths. Worpole is confident about Bletchley Park’s ability to expand its schools programme, and maths is a central part of this.
“I think the reason that we are popular with schools is because it’s not difficult for a maths department to justify a visit to Bletchley Park,” Worpole says. “If you are looking for a real-life example of how maths made a difference, it is here.”
Simon Stephens
“The cliche is that you go to a party and tell someone you’re a mathematician; there’s a pregnant pause and suddenly that person needs to get another drink,” says June -Barrow-Green, a member of the London Mathematical Society’s governing council.
“People assume that maths isn’t for them and it’s become acceptable to give up on maths altogether.”
The reasons for society’s maths phobia are debatable, but many put it down to the way the subject is taught in schools, a lack of understanding about its application in the real world and the perception that it is simply too hard for the majority of us to master.
Museums are in a unique position to help change negative attitudes towards maths, yet the subject remains largely absent from museums in the UK and, unlike in the US and many European countries, there is no dedicated maths museum here.
“There is potential to show maths in most museum objects, from ancient remains to modern art, but we don’t,” says Alexandra Fitzsimmons, a content and storytelling consultant and founder of educational -charity Maths on Toast.
“The amazing thing that museums do is help people see things in a different way or from a new perspective, but this hasn’t been the case for maths.”
Part of the challenge for museums is how to bring maths alive and show its relevance to visitors in a gallery setting.
In September, the Science Museum in London announced that it had received a £5m donation from the philanthropists David and Claudia Harding for the development of a new maths gallery, which will be designed by the architect Zaha Hadid.
Dedicated maths gallery
The gallery won’t be open for another two years, but it is part of a wider strategy to introduce more maths across the museum.
The curator of the gallery, David Rooney, who previously led the delivery of the Science Museum’s Codebreaker exhibition about the life of Alan Turing, says it will be historical and will explore “the mathematical practice that underpins everything in the modern world”.
To ensure the right stories are told (Rooney is not a mathematician), an advisory panel of experts will be set up to meet twice a year to give feedback. The museum will also host its first mathematician-in--residence – Thomas Woolley from the University of Oxford.
“Our approach won’t be to start with maths, which many people would find off-putting, but instead to look at all the things that maths underpins, such as aviation, money, medicine and so on,” Rooney says.
“Our collection can help reveal how mathematical practice underpins timeless themes that are relevant to everyone, such as life and death, trade and travel, work and play. This won’t be an encyclopaedia of the history of maths; it will be an edited selection of narratives about people, objects and principles. We want to avoid having a corner dedicated to ‘women in maths’ or non-western contributions – these will be stories threaded across the displays.”
By focusing on these narratives, the Science Museum hopes to get people to recognise maths as more than just arithmetic and to value its contribution to the world.
A new approach
This is different to the hands-on and interactive approach used in specialist museums, such as MoMath, the national museum of mathematics in New York, and science centres such as At-Bristol and Techniquest in the UK.
“The displays have to work for our 3.4 million visitors; some may be mathematicians but many won’t be experts,” Rooney says. “Some of the hands-on maths displays I’ve seen [in other museums] are internal presentations of maths – it’s hard to see how they relate to the real world.
“Likewise, with purely collection-based displays it can be quite hard to see the life around the use of those objects. With the Turing exhibition, we told a biographical and emotional story that aimed to inspire people to find out more about the maths. But maths wasn’t in the way of the story.”
Geoff Wain and Margaret Brown, both retired mathematics education professors, are the co-chairs of MathsWorld UK, a charity that wants to build the UK’s first dedicated maths museum. Although it has yet to find a home or funding, the vision for the museum is similar to the Science -Museum’s: to explore what maths means to modern society.
But rather than using artefacts to tell the history of maths, MathsWorld UK wants to change the perception of maths through an entirely interactive experience aimed at children and adults.
“Historical artefacts aren’t going to turn people on to maths,” Brown says. “We’ve also got to get away from maths being about solving equations or doing calculations – we want to excite people and demonstrate how important maths is.”
Introducing the subject into displays may be a challenge, but for many museums the real potential of maths lies in their education and learning work, and there is an increasing focus on Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects in school national -curriculums.
Fitzsimmons says the new maths curriculum in England sets out an ambition for teachers to get students more excited about maths and to see its creative potential.
“It also includes lots of stuff that students have to know, but doesn’t explain how to match the two together,” she says. “The opportunity for museums is to help teachers make that link and provide them with resources they can use in the classroom.”
Wolverhampton Art Gallery introduced its maths in museums workshops in 2013 in anticipation of changes to the national curriculum.
“We were worried that schools might not visit because art wasn’t a core subject,” says Tess Radcliffe, the museum’s learning and community engagement manager.
“So we introduced a more inter-disciplinary approach, including literacy and science, but for us maths is huge because there are such strong links in the collection – for example, Islamic art, pop art and works from the Enlightenment.
“It’s early days, but we’ve found that learning simple maths through art appeals to children, especially those who struggle with the way maths is taught in schools.”
The workshops are mainly used by primary schools, where teachers are often not maths specialists, but Radcliffe says that it is a challenge to get secondary schools interested. This is probably because of time pressures on secondary school teachers as well as a lack of awareness that such workshops exist.
“There’s also a perception that there is a disconnect between ‘exciting’ or creative maths and what pupils need to learn to pass a test,” Fitzsimmons says. “So museums need to be explicit about what the links are to the curriculum.”
Rethinking maths
Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, which tells the story of codebreaking and intelligence during the second world war, has had lots of success with its education programme. Thomas Briggs, its education officer, is a former maths teacher whose role is to go to schools to teach them about codebreaking.
“Most of the people who book me are maths rather than history teachers, and I would like to do more cross-curricula activity to reach people who are ‘not into maths’,” he says.
“It can be challenging as teachers don’t always see what maths is. Real-life maths is not always seen as maths. For me, it’s about showing that maths is the application of what you learn in the classroom – it’s not just writing symbols on a page, it’s the reason we do that.”
Interest in codebreaking and mathematics is expected to increase following the release of The Imitation Game, a film about the breaking of the Enigma code and starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing.
The media attention around the award of the Fields Medal – described as the Nobel prize for mathematics – to its first female winner, Maryam Mirzakhani, also suggests that maths may be making the transition from a subject we loath to something that we should be celebrating.
If maths is having something of a moment, then the time could be ripe for museums to relook at their displays and education programmes – something institutions such as Wolverhampton Art Gallery and the Thackray Medical Museum in Leeds are already doing.
“As a society we are closed-minded when it comes to maths,” Briggs says. “People will happily say they don’t like maths and can’t do it, in a way that they never would about being able to write their own name.
“I want museums to take a lead and start to show maths and how it relates to the real world. They are in an ideal position to say to people ‘what you think you know about maths, think again’.”
Finding funding
Funding for maths projects in museums is a challenge, although the Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) agenda does provide some opportunities.
Penny Fidler, the chief executive of the UK Association for Science and Discovery Centres, which represents more than 60 institutions in the UK, says science centres have struggled to secure lottery funding for capital projects, instead relying on grants from the likes of the Wellcome Trust.
Private investment from businesses that have an interest in cultivating maths skills – from technology or engineering firms to banks – have already proved fruitful for museums.
Last year, the National Maritime Museum in London was part-funded by investment firm Winton Capital to run Maths and Beyond, a programme of workshops, masterclasses and planetary shows for key stage 3 students.
Other foundations that mention numeracy as key aims include the Ernest Cook Trust, the Mercers Company and the Rayne Foundation.
The Science in Society fund, which is managed by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, offers financial support to individuals and organisations to create and run pilot projects that take science subjects to diverse audiences.
Rebecca Atkinson
Maths at the heart of Bletchley Park
As the home of world war two codebreaking, Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes has maths at its heart.
“Part of our USP is that there are few heritage sites that have problem-solving and maths at their core,” says Victoria Worpole, the director of learning and collections at Bletchley Park.
“Many of the people who worked here were mathematicians and they used their skills in a way that was relevant to society at the time. We want people to understand that those skills are still relevant now.”
Even though you don’t have to be a mathematician to be a codebreaker, a lot of those who worked at Bletchley Park were. They included Alan Turing, a mathematician and the pioneer of modern-day computing.
Bletchley Park recently appointed a Turing education officer, Joanna Shelton, who is reworking the museum’s schools programme. There is a strong emphasis on maths, codebreaking and Stem subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).
Among the other maths activities at the museum is a series of family workshops organised with Maths on Toast, an organisation that runs community maths events for families.
Bletchley Park is also part of the local maths hub. These hubs are part of an £11m government programme to support the teaching of maths. Worpole is confident about Bletchley Park’s ability to expand its schools programme, and maths is a central part of this.
“I think the reason that we are popular with schools is because it’s not difficult for a maths department to justify a visit to Bletchley Park,” Worpole says. “If you are looking for a real-life example of how maths made a difference, it is here.”
Simon Stephens