Aboriginal Applied Mathematics

Extract

Last week I felt that one of my sixth form applied mathematics sets was finding its subject too straightforward. Imaginations had been stuffed with smooth spheres, perfectly elastic and moving as in a vacuum. Methods relied almost exclusively on the less complicated aspects of Newton’s work, with even solid rigid bodies seeming to behave like the ubiquitous point masses. Advanced level text books contain a good store of examples and, needless to say, the class had worked solidly through its own book. “Solidly” was the right word! I wondered how to fan a flagging interest, whether to bring out my own constructional toys for another lesson and to set up a pulley system or project particles from one side of the room to the other, whether to take over the physics laboratory and let the pupils use some proper apparatus. Alas, my pupils are more sophisticated than I and therefore eschew the use of toys, while regrettably the physics staff arrange their physics experiments so much more ably than I could. Besides, it would be entertaining to see the sixth formers investigating a situation which could not be explained with the help of Advanced level mathematics. Let them flounder, as perhaps our forefathers floundered whilst discovering such trivia as Hooke’s Law or Newton’s Experimental Law!