Maths Crisis Gets Broadsheet's Attention. (May 15, 2007)

    At the beginning of April over 500 Australian and international mathematicians sent an open letter to the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, calling to his attention the crisis which is engulfing Australian mathematics both from an academic and a practical viewpoint and urging government action to revive the nation's ailing mathematical sciences.

Among the signatories: International Mathematical Union president Sir John Ball, the American Mathematical Society's executive director John Ewing and the International Council on Industrial and Applied Mathematics' new president Rolf Jeltsch as well as Australian Fields Medallist Terry Tao.

While neither the Prime Minister nor the Minister for Education, Science and Training, Julie Bishop, have responded directly to the open letter or acknowledged the existence of the The National Strategic Review of Mathematical Sciences Research in Australia which was published in December 2006, TFW was told by one academic mathematician as regard the 2007/08 federal budget:

The increase in funding for mathematics and statistics places them into the same funding band as computer science, and you'll recall that that is what we sought in the review. The increase amounts to a little over 50% more money per mathematics and statistics student. While it may not be the case that an increase of this proportion will actually flow through to mathematics and statistics departments, a significant part of it ultimately will. Just as importantly, mathematics and statistics will now be seen by university managers as strategically important, because they have been singled out for special treatment, clearly in response to skills shortages.  Moreover, mathematics and statistics departments will be viewed as a  means of earning money for universities.

[Added May 16:  University of Adelaide Professor of Mathematics Michael Murray notes in the interest for completeness, "For each maths student the University receives two quantities of money -- one direct from DEST (raised in the budget) and the other from student HECS (which varies a bit from Uni to Uni).  For example at Adelaide we have Before budget : $7118 + $5381 = $12499 ($7118 is the HECS component). After budget: $7118 + $8217 = $15335, i.e. about a 22% increase. This is not to criticise the result which is outstanding, but staff shouldn't be expecting departmental budgets to grow by 50%."]

And yesterday The Age's Elisabeth Tarica wrote the 2,500 word Go figure! With pay so low, it figures that many more students look for careers outside of numbers.

She writes, "Thursday night in a sprawling Victorian house in Brunswick: a group of the state's best minds [the Mathematical Association of Victoria] gathers... [their] greatest puzzle... how they will turn around

 their profession's fortunes. As almost everyone agrees, maths is in crisis.

    "A reason is evident tonight: almost everyone is on the high side of 50, many near retirement. The ranks are not replenishing. Fewer students take higher-level maths at university and at secondary levels."

Ms Tarica then informs her readers, "Two-thirds of schools have problems staffing maths classes... many more expect the situation to deteriorate as older, experienced teachers retire."

And what should be obvious is "the sharp decline in youth studying higher-level maths leaves organisations such as the CSIRO and the Australian Bureau of Statistics struggling to recruit qualified staff."

"It's a rather unpleasant circle. All of these things are clearly inter-related but we just can't break out," says University of Melbourne's Hyam Rubinstein, the chairman of the national committee for mathematical sciences at the Australian Academy of Science. He continues, "We have no young people in the system, there are virtually no young academics in mathematics and statistics left ... the old guard is trying the best they can to keep the system functioning but we are really at a point where, if we don't bring a large number of young people in the system pretty quickly, it will just fall over.

    "There's demand from the mining industry, agriculture, resource and financial sector for skilled mathematical and statistical modellers and we are not producing them. To think that we can import them is very naive."

And the president of the International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Professor Ian Sloan, concurs: "It is fair to say that there are problems of this kind in many parts of the Western world and Asia of declining numbers of students going into mathematics and research support but none of them are as bad as Australia... If we are to remain a happy, healthy country it will be because we are the clever country. That's very well understood in the booming economies of Asia. They are not just thinking of manufacturing but are thinking really seriously about education."

Ms Tarica than refers to the "recent study by the Australian Academy of Science [which] reveals that maths departments in the nation's top eight research universities have lost almost a third of their permanent academics over the past decade. Other universities have either closed their maths departments or halved their size. RMIT is about to cut its maths and statistics staff by a quarter," while John Rice, president of the Australian Council of Deans of Science says bluntly, "Our chief concern is that we don't see any planning on the part of the relevant education authorities that is credible for dealing with the level of staff renewal required for the rejuvenation of science and mathematics, in terms of the amount of teacher turnover, and modernisation of pedagogy and curriculum."

The recurrent theme in study after study is that those teaching maths lack competence. You can talk all you want about jazzing up curricula as in the "a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down" but if the teachers don't know what they're talking about, their students will twig all to quickly and respect is lost.

If you don't know your subject you're sunk before you walk into the room on the first day of class.

So what does Ms Tarica tell us:

High-school maths is more often taught by people with inadequate training, while the number of maths lecturers is critically low, with teaching left to non-specialists. Junior maths classes are more likely to be taught by teachers without strong mathematical backgrounds, says Simon Pryor, executive officer of the Victorian maths association. "Increasingly, classrooms are being run by teachers who would themselves say: 'I either don't have the maths content or maths method and I'm doing this because I am the best person for the job but really if we could get a maths teacher I'd be much happier teaching something else'," he says.

And the to do list? Elisabeth Tarica quotes The National Strategic Review of Mathematical Sciences Research in Australia:

Solving the crisis - what needs to be done
* Greatly increase the number of university graduates with appropriate maths and statistical training.
* Broaden the maths sciences research base.
* Identify, anticipate and meet industry needs for a pool of tertiary-trained expert mathematicians and statisticians.
* Ensure that maths teachers have appropriate training.
* Encourage more high-school students to study intermediate and advanced maths.

Times a wastin'