PAULINE PERSPECTIVE
Mathematics at St Paul’s
Mathematics at St Paul’s in the 1960s
From Climbing Out: the beginning of a life by Bob Phillips (1964-68), Broomfield Press, 2015. Available at lulu.com
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here was an outgoing Head of Maths – a small, apparently elderly, balding, rather frail man by the name of AJ Moakes (Maths Department 1931-67). I had very few lessons with him; it was Hugh Neill (Maths Department 1966-72), the man he brought in to become the new Head of Maths who had an impact on me. It was apparent to me even at 13 that Neill was a very young man; that was, I guess, another indication of St Paul’s standing in the cosmos – confidence in the judgement of one outgoing Head of subject to nominate a successor, even early in his career. A young professional, joining the regimen of St Paul’s teaching, and the regimen of disciplined St Paul’s learning, would get the best possible impetus to success. One story about Moakes. There was a class that was to St Paul’s standard of discipline, rioting in the next room along the corridor. That is to say, the level of noise was high. Mr Moakes appeared in the doorway, all 5'4" of him, clad in the ubiquitous suit and tie and academic gown. “This noise is intolerable.” Not much response. “If you boys do not maintain silence immediately, I shall be forced to stamp my foot!” Stunned silence. Exit AJ Moakes, triumphant disciplinarian
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(and famous among the science boys as an inspiring teacher). I think my year was Hugh Neill’s first in the school. He was good at giving personal guidance in class: brilliant at showing the way through mathematical difficulty. This was a mixed blessing, though – when Neill leaned over your desk to help, one could not help being aware of the time since his jacket had last been fumigated. Hugh Neill continued the lead of AJ Moakes in taking St Paul’s into the modern mathematics well ahead of the pack. With my very traditional grounding in maths in Africa, it appeared to me not really as maths at all, but a bit of a confidence trick. Let me recount a very early class with Neill and see if I can explain this apprehension of a sleight of hand, in words. Neill drew a very simple problem on the board. Man at point X trying to get to destination at point Y by the shortest possible route. There is a river between man and destination, represented by two parallel lines a few inches apart. Constraint: when crossing the river, the man can only travel at right angles to the shores. Work out his shortest land path. “Work out” is what I did – lots of geometry and algebra – good fun, but laborious. Neill at the board: “No, no, no – no hard work required! Suppose we
just, as a mental exercise, transposed one bank of the river so that it coincided with the other – it doesn’t make any difference to the man’s path, since he has to cross the two banks at the same point on the river”. Groans from the class, and a few boys exclaiming, “Of course – it’s just a straight line.” Mr Neill beams. I am consumed with something like anger – that is cheating. You cannot just magic the river out of the way. Transformation was just one magic trick. Neill taught us vectors and matrices and Venn diagrams as other magic to bring simplicity to situations for which traditional mathematics brought lots of hard work. Probability – a language of beautiful insight into the way in which a portion of the world works. He made of maths a language of illumination rather than a discipline of hard work and rules to be learned. (He was very apologetic later, when we came to the integral calculus, telling us that, sadly, there was no way around simply learning the patterns of different integrals.) Hugh Neill, making a major innovation in advance of most schools, brought computing to St Paul’s in 1967. He and a couple of other schools – I believe Westminster and Eton – struck up a partnership with BP. They would give schools time on their
