math music

Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, said that while the introduction of the numeracy strategy had enthused a generation of younger children about maths, too often this momentum was lost between the ages of 11 to 14.
“Pupils often get very bored with the first stage of secondary school maths. There is too much emphasis on numbers and sums. People think maths should be all about arithmetic, but that is wrong.
Professor du Sautoy, who often plays a trumpet during lectures to illustrate the similarities between harmonics and the sine waves used to predict prime numbers, suggested that maths teaching should be similar to music teaching.He also suggested that teenagers struggling with maths may benefit from learning a musical instrument. “There is evidence that if you play an instrument during the early teenage years it stimulates the mathematical side of your brain. Both music and maths are about searching for and recognising patterns,” he said.He also advocates mixed-age group teaching for maths, believing that the subject has to be taught as a pyramid from bottom to top