math and media

It is a rare sight in India: A mathematics teacher in a television commercial for mouth freshener. This is unusual because popular media in this country has no place, or time, for ‘cerebral’ activities such as mathematics.Mathematics teaching is a serious business and portrayal of its practitioners on popular media should be given a careful consideration. A few in the mass media care about these things. No wonder, India’s most popular forms of entertainment ? Hindi films and cricket ? have never taken mathematics seriously. We would not expect a film on Srinivasa Ramanujan or a play on Bhaskara. Those who have seen A Beautiful Mind on mathematician John Nash, or the East End play Copenhagen on Niels Bohr-Werner Heisenberg meeting would agree that a sensitive portrayal only help this human activity. Mathematicians would gloss over the inaccuracies in such efforts and join hands in applauding them.Teenagers’ sporting of Albert Einstein’s famous equation on their T-shirts is no barometer for mathematics literacy. Years of training in recognising the patterns help people become mathematicians. Over the millennia, cultural conditioning has helped humans to get attuned to mathematics. THE TELEGRAPH