MEET MR BROWN Makemaths.com is a website for students and teacher created by our well-respected maths teacher Mr Brown. Luis Sanchez and Precious John caught up with him in the darkroom to find out why mental arithmetic is actually mental. There are some very good maths teachers at Tallis. What’s the secret? Showing people there’s more to maths than just adding, dividing and subtracting. I’m very interested in the abstract. Connecting maths to the real world. Making it fun. What is the most important contribution maths has made to society?
Conspiracy?
It describes the world around us. And its worst contribution to society? Carol Vorderman. What generally drives your passion for maths? The purity and beauty of it. It’s like intelligence condensed. It’s a language of logic.
Whether you believe the world is run by the illuminati or that the Mayans predicted the end of the world, or if you think it’s all rubbish, you can’t deny that everyone loves a good conspiracy. But what were the Mayans actually on about? Words: Sang Nguyen
Did you have any problems as a young student of mathematics? I didn’t like maths. I thought it was boring because our teacher was boring. I started to like it at A Level because it became a bit more difficult, but I really started to love maths when I became a teacher. What area of maths would you say is your weakest. I’m not very good at mental arithmetic. That’s why it’s called mental arithmetic. Because it’s mental. What made you want to create the website in the first place? Just to bring my teaching to a wider audience and teach people a love for maths. I think maths education is boring and needs to be spiced up a bit. What do you think Scrabble would be like without algebra? It’d be the same. I’ve got a little brain teaser. You’ve got two seconds and I’ll say it only once. What’s 5x6x10 ÷ 200. 1500. It’s 3000 ÷ 200. Aw. It’s 1.5, isn’t it
History has a long and rich tradition of apocalyptic predictions, all of which were wrong. Yet some people still think that this time round, it’s the real deal. Why now? Because of ancient Mayan calendars. Mayan calendars not only recorded the days and years, but also longer cycles of about five millennia. So they could easily make calendars that went thousands of years into the future. But, of course, thousands of years in the future from thousands of years ago brings us to current times when the Mayan calendars stop in 2012. New-age thinkers decided that the wise Mayans stopped making calendars because they knew when the world would end. And because new agers are happy – though scientifically illiterate – people, their vision of 2012 was a great spiritual awakening or world reboot or other hippy-consciousnessexpanding nonsense that the Mayans, who spent time pulling strings of thorns through peoples’ tongues, probably didn’t have in mind. To a normal person the thought that a calendar finishing indicates the end of the world, is an odd conclusion. After all, the amount of time in the Universe is infinite and the amount of stone is limited, so, at some point the Mayans had to stop carving calendars. What should have stayed a fringe belief turned into mass hysteria with the 2012 disaster movie that swept the Academy Awards and the numerous Emmy-nominated apocalypse documentaries on The History Channel. NASA became so inundated with questions that they had to take time away from their busy robot-building, frontierpushing, knowledge-expanding, civilization-inspiring schedule to write a webpage explaining that the humansacrificing, stone-age Mayans, who had neither wheels to pull carts nor glass to make telescopes, didn’t know more about science at the dawn of history than real scientists do today.
He will be charged with carrying weapons of math instruction.
But the parade of crazy marched on anyway making wilder and wilder predictions for Earth including a Geomagnetic Reversal which unfolds on a geological timescale, not a single day; a collision with mysterious Planet X which no astronomer has found; and a galactic synchronization beam, whatever the hell that is. A sane person, at this point, would wonder how the Mayans were able to predict astro-physical anomalies thousands of years in advance and millions of miles away yet didn’t foresee the Spanish coming across the Atlantic. And that’s because the Mayans never predicted apocalypse. The only people to claim the Mayans knew about the end of the world were distinctly not Mayans.