BLAME the Babylonians – they were the ones who condemned all future children to struggle with problems like "if three men take two days to plough a field, what is the square root of…?" Or, as one of the world's earliest textbooks – a slab of stone us
ed to teach scribes in Ancient Mesopotamia – has it: "I drew a square 60 units long and inside it I drew four circles, what are their areas?"
There's something so immediately familiar about that question, which draws you back over almost 4,000 years to imagine a young student sighing at the prospect (or perhaps that's just my own issues with numbers). Professor Marcus du Sautoy, who presented The Story of Maths, is rather more enthusiastic about such problems.
This rather grand Open University series, exploring the history of the science behind all sciences, economics and construction, took him around the world in search of the development of the system we use now, starting in Egypt where he noted: "There's a very strong link between bureaucracy and the development of maths (here]". What a surprise – the first use of mathematics was to calculate the area of farmers' land for taxation.
Du Sautoy is a lively presenter who got particularly carried away contemplating the ratios of the Pyramids. While inevitably some of the concepts he had to explain were complicated, he made a good stab at demonstrating them with visual props such as stones, food and sticks, which helped those of us who still tend to count on our fingers. And it was impressive to learn just how long people have been working out sophisticated calculations, as well as the variety of other methods used to make them.
The Babylonians, by the way, weren't all homework and no play – they also, he revealed, probably invented the board game, so after a hard day puzzling out quadratic equations, at least the scribes could relax with their equivalent of backgammon.
No relaxing allowed in Unbreakable, a strangely earnest and macho "challenge" series in which eight people undergo ridiculously uncomfortable ordeals in a bid to find out which of them is the toughest, or possibly most desperate. Their first trial was in the jungle of Guyana where a local tribe gave them an initiation ritual that involved being stung by huntsmen ants.
I have my doubts about this tribe and whether they were playing a bit of a joke on the contestants, after having heard them declare things like "you could chuck me in a desert, you could chuck me anywhere you want, I'm gonna succeed". (This was from Heather, a 20-year-old martial arts champion.)
They survived that, but a subsequent run through the burning heat of the jungle proved the undoing of body-builder Nathan, who collapsed in convulsions and later withdrew from the series despite the insistence of their instructor that "pain is glory!" In this case, the glory of winning a minor reality show on Five hardly seemed worth coming so close to their limits.
For those who stayed in and made it to Papua New Guinea, they were treated to being thrashed on the back with a bamboo whip by presenter/explorer Benedict Allen, until they were flayed red raw. Great viewing for sadists, I suppose, and probably the reason he got the hosting job rather than Davina McCall or Ant & Dec.
The seven remaining competitors did, however, get a nice fish supper at the end of it all. Okay, they had to bite the piranhas' skulls first to kill them, but I hear the chips just came from the freezer.
The full article contains 616 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
