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Published on January 21, 2008

The military hardware exhibition was one of the top events on Children's Day. Army headquarters was crowded as kids had lots of fun, climbing tanks, touching cannons and getting inside helicopters. Many want to be soldiers when they grow up, carrying guns and piloting fighter jets to protect the country.

But the traditional duties of a soldier may become less relevant in the information era as cyber warfare has emerged. Anyone using a computer can be attacked by mathematically gifted hackers from anywhere and at any time. The economic war is endless and a country's competitiveness is determined by its number of scientists - mathematicians, engineers or physicists for example. In Thailand these numbers are low, as is the country's overall literacy in maths compared to our competitors.

One of the most interesting topics concerning mathematics is how to properly teach the subject to kids, since it is a bedrock for many disciplines in both the natural and social sciences.

Recent research by psychologist Daniela O'Neill of the University of Waterloo in Canada suggests that pre-schoolers with narrative skills will do reasonably well in maths once they begin schooling.

O'Neill showed kids aged between three and four a picture book and asked them what they saw. Two years later, she gave these children maths tests. Her findings concluded that the more sophisticated the pre-schooler's storytelling abilities were, the more likely it was that the child would do well in mathematics two years later.

Meanwhile, Keith Devlin, one of America's top mathematicians, believes that a child's early storytelling ability indicates how well the child could learn calculus and advanced mathematics in later years.

Devlin also believes that mathematics is encoded in the genes of humans and other species - what he calls "innate mathematics". Mathematics has a survival value, he says, while he called the maths taught in school "abstract mathematics". For example, he says, a tiger or a man does calculus instinctively without knowing formal or abstract calculus when each runs to catch prey.

For people to acquire abstract maths skills, they should be aware that mathematical activity is a natural thing that occurs all the time in nature, Devlin suggested in his book "The Math Instinct". It is best to approach abstract maths as merely a formalised version of one's innate maths, he advised. Repetitive training is also very important, he wrote.

Nipon Poapongsakorn, dean of Thammasat University's economics department, said students from rural areas passed tough examinations to enter universities because they were good at maths, while they did poorly in the English language. This suggests that children born in rural areas are not at much of a disadvantage compared with their counterparts in the big city if they have a maths teacher or parents literate in the subject around to help them.

Teachers or parents could gently introduce maths to children by taking them to guess how tall a tree is, or by introducing them to trigonometry.

A highly competitive country with a high rate of maths literacy and a large number of specialists can still make blunders, as demonstrated by the sub-prime crisis in the US that had a sharp adverse impact on the US economy and caused a global slowdown in the world economy.

Giant banks, highly respected rating agencies and many smart investors made a collective mistake in pricing securitised bonds  known as CDOs (collateral debt obligations) which were underlined by sub-prime mortgages. They made the wrong use of an advance financial mathematical model. It wasn't until the market collapsed that they realised such a model was a destructive bomb. "The model got the price wrong," said Prasarn Trairatvorakul, president of Kasikornbank.

Some mathematicians have predicted that the financial market, which is highly volatile in nature, will be a green field for an emerging new branch of advanced mathematics. It is waiting for mathematically gifted kids to further pursue the goal of finding new ways to use the tools of maths to manage the market better.

The ongoing debate about the threat of climate change has seen economists searching for the right mathematical formula to price carbon. Carbon trading is in its infancy and many believe the market could make a great contribution to the global effort to lessen global warming caused by human activities.

Back in Thailand, an example of chaos in the management of Suvarnabhumi Airport also suggests how the specialists at Airports of Thailand (AOT) totally failed in carrying out simple mathematical calculations.

It is unbelievable that the authority failed to provide enough toilets for the large number of travellers passing through. When this airport opened for services, there was chaos at the luggage claim. This was partly due to the larger size of the airport and the fact that more trucks were needed to transfer luggage from the aircraft to the luggage belts, and because the vehicles needed more time to travel between the aircraft and the belts. AOT, however, did not anticipate this.

There was also a miscalculation concerning how noise pollution would effect residential areas. Another point that the AOT has still to do anything about is finding a more efficient way of communicating information to travellers, such as how long it will take to go from the immigration counter to the boarding gate. Only those with business or first-class tickets get updated information from staff in VIP lounges.

But we could say that more than 90 per cent of travellers are unable to manage their time at the airport efficiently due to AOT failing to provide them with the proper information. If AOT could improve its communication with tourists, they would be able to spend more money at duty-free shops or on a Thai massage without missing the flight. All it would take is a little care from AOT and some simple mathematical calculations.

Wichit Chaitrong

The Nation