Rishi Sunak wants every adult to be ‘numerate’. To have maths skills. And I completely agree. But to what level does he wish us to achieve? Addin’? Minus-in’? Multiplyin’??? Diviiiiidin’??? That’s really hard shit. I get that if you want to be a decent darts player you need both adding AND subtraction skills to a fast and proficient level. But what, precisely, does he want us to know?

There’s basic numeracy, there’s the ‘easy’ stuff; trigonometry, geometry, algebra, ‘sets’, graphs. But they flummox a lot of people. Its only nerds like me who really love all that. Integral calculus, chaos theory, fractals, relativity, quantum physics, 4-dimensional hyperspace, where does it fucking end?

I was good at maths. Until I met… statistics!!! Which was from another planet, mentally speaking. I just… couldn’t. It was only when they invented Sky tv that, like every other football fan in the country, I became a statistician. Because our national game had become, and still is, obsessed with ‘statistics’. How far Roy Keane ran in any match before he killed someone. The percentage of Spurs passes which went to the opposing team (87%). Useful stuff. Essential.

But that’s not real statistics. Its not probabilities and analytical test models and chai-squareds and non-parametric t-testing and stuff. If I was a gambler I’d have been better at probabilities. Or broke. But alas, that was the one addiction/obsession that I missed out on.

So does Rishi want us to do easy things, like proving Fermat’s last theorem (still never done, ever, by anyone, whatever the book said), or become so numerate that we can attempt the completely impossible, like working out whether paying 27p per Kw/Hour for our electricity with a standing charge of 35p per day is going to be better value than paying 24p per Kw/hr and a 43p standing charge. Or what are the cost benefits of not declaring your wife’s business interests in laws you’re pushing through parliament. I think he needs to clarify.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx