17 August

When they teach maths at school, they rarely give you the history behind the maths. It's the history which often brings the whole subject alive. Take calculus. Calculus firstly is some of the sexiest *looking* maths you can do. Those curves and functions, beautiful. It was invented almost simultaneously by 2 giants of thought, one a philosopher (Leibniz) and the other a scientist (Newton). What they rarely tell you at school is why we need calculus, and why we need algebra, and why we need geometry (the big 3). Geometry helps us understand shapes and angles, algebra gives us a way to generalize basic arithmetic, and calculus gives us a way to calculate how things are changing (slopes of curves and areas under and beneath curves). There is a pretty good argument that sometimes scientists are better teachers of maths, because there can show you how it's actually used. A lot of people hate maths, often because it was so badly taught. I don't think anybody is born bad at maths, or bad at any subject, it all comes back to the teaching.