Stand up for sums

摘要

I'm going to let you in on a secret. Mathematicians like to pretend they are on a quest into the deepest realms of abstract thought, spending years or even decades probing the solutions of esoteric equations. But really they are playing one of the world's longest-running games, and having an awful lot of fun in the process. Think World of Warcraft, but with a pencil. I'd never really thought of maths in this way before, but a passage in Matt Parker's book, Things toMakeandDo in the Fourth Dimension, reminded me just how much I enjoyed studying the subject. Maths, he says, is "a game in which you choose the starting rules... and then try to prove as many new facts as possible from there". Perhaps that doesn't sound like much fun to you. The problem is that playing the game requires years of learning the basics, the primary school maths of multiplication tables and long division. But as Parker points out, mistaking school mathematics for the real deal is like thinking pro footballers just practise dribbling the ball very quickly.