Among the ways in which a teacher can kindle a pupil's interest in mathematics is by invoking spirits from the subjects past: spirits of men full of imagination and determination; enterprising individuals brimming over with new ideas; pioneers who not only changed their particular discipline, but who in some cases even altered our perception of the world. The Scots have a heritage of which to be proud in science and mathematics. This article discusses four pioneers in statistics.

[This is part of a lecture delivered at the Annual Conference of the Association on 31st March 1967. It contains an elementary teaching approach to matrices.]

Let us look at this diagram and consider what it might depict. It might be a map of airline routes between airports in three countries; with two airports, x 1 and x 2, in the first country, three airports y 1, y 2 and y 3, in the second country, and two, z 1 and z 2, in the third. The numbers beside the lines in the diagram might indicate the number of alternative flights (perhaps planes departing at different times) along the routes.

If z is a function of y having a differential coefficient at a certain point, and y is a function of x having a differential coefficient at the corresponding point, then z is a function of x having a differential coefficient at that point, and this differential coefficient is given by the formula

This theorem, thought not always stated so carefully, will be found in all texts on the calculus; but, so far as I am aware, no English writer, not even the most exact, offers a valid proof.

We came across the ‘two girls’ version of the children's gender problem nearly 35 years ago. How we came to it we cannot remember, but Martin Gardner had published a variant of it in the Scientific American in 1959. It re-emerged for us in the summer of 2010, following the publication of an article in Science News [1]. Subsequently Keith Devlin wrote about how this re-emergence impacted on him, and noting that ‘Probability Can Bite“ [2]. The mathematics herein reflects and extends that in Devlin's article.

In case the reader has not encountered the problem before, we first pose four problems.

1. A family has two children. One of them is a girl. What is the probability that they are both girls?

2. A family has two children. The younger is a girl. What is the probability that they are both girls?

3. A family has two children. One of them is a girl, and she was born on a Tuesday. What is the probability that they are both girls?

4. A family has two children. One of them is a girl, and she has green hair. What is the probability that they are both girls?