The election of this year’s President has in some respects made history. There have been three previous women Presidents in the 95 years of the Association’s life and I recall with admiration the names of such eminent predecessors as Dr. Busbridge and Dr Cartwright, and with affectionate sadness at this time of loss, Miss L. D. Adams. But this is the first occasion on which one woman has succeeded another in the Presidency That there should be two women Presidents in sequence must be a significant event in the somewhat slow development of the recognition of women’s interest in mathematics. Moreover it is the first time that a woman who has had the ordinary responsibility of bringing up a family of children has also had the wonderful opportunity of continuing her mathematical work to the point of serving this Association as its President. This indeed makes me realise that mathematics is taking on a new role with a universal appeal.

Miss L. D. Adams had a personality of such warmth and generosity that her loss will be deeply felt by very many people associated with education. Some will have known her personally through her visits to schools as H.M.I., or her lively contributions at conferences and refresher courses. We in this Association mourn her as one of our most distinguished members. She had an unbroken record of fifty-one years of membership and during that period had served on the Teaching Committee for some twenty years, exerting a strong formative influence which helped the Committee to broaden its enquiries until it can now claim to have produced reports on the whole range of school mathematics. The quality of thought that she brought to the Association’s discussions was recognized in 1959 when she was elected President, only the second woman to hold that office in the long years from 1871. To Miss Adams this tribute from the Association brought surprise and much pleasure, for in her natural modesty she had not thought of herself as possessing any gifts to merit her election.

The Report was prepared at the request of the Sub-committee on Instruction of the British National Committee for Mathematics. It formed the basis of the presentation of the United Kingdom point of view in a discussion on the topic at the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Moscow in August, 1966.

The Gleaning on p. 427 of The Gazette for December, 1965, has produced three notes on a very individual teacher. In an age when “aids” flourish, we do well to return from time to time to the teacher in the class-room, on whom everything depends. These notes are printed in full (apart from introductions) as a tribute to the past and as an encouragement to the eccentrics of the present.

The interest of a survey of motivation in mathematics among girls first became apparent at a Ministry of Education conference in Cambridge in August 1963 when, among other subjects, new syllabuses in mathematics were discussed. These had been designed by men teaching in boys’ schools.

Kendall and Moran, in introducing their book on Geometrical Probability (Griffin, 1963), give as illustrations three solutions of a problem due to Bertrand, that of finding the probability that a “random chord” of a circle is longer than the side of the inscribed equilateral triangle. The first solution regards the random chord as being generated by the two points on the circumference which it joins, and which are uniformly and independently distributed. In the second the chord is assumed to have a fixed direction perpendicular to a given diameter, and its point of intersection with this is uniformly distributed over the diameter. In the third, the foot of the perpendicular from the centre is uniformly distributed over the circle. The probabilities in these three cases are respectively ⅓, ½, and ¼.