Top ten facts about maths

Today is World Maths Day, the second day of Unesco’s World Education Games when schools around the world will be vying with each other to solve maths problems.

People have been doing mathematics since around 30,000BC

1. In 2010 on World Maths Day, 1.13 million students from more than 235 countries set a record correctly answering 479,732,613 questions. 

2. Americans called mathematics ‘math’, arguing that ‘mathematics’ functions as a singular noun so ‘math’ should be singular too. 

3. They have been calling maths ‘math’ for much longer than we have called it ‘maths’. 

4. ‘Mathematics’ is an anagram of ‘me asthmatic’. 

5. The only number in English that is spelled with its letters in alphabetical order is ‘forty’. 

6. The only Shakespeare play to include the word ‘mathematics’ is The Taming Of The Shrew. 

7. Notches on animal bones show that people have been doing mathematics, or at least making computations, since around 30,000BC. 

8. The word ‘hundrath’ in Old Norse, from which our ‘hundred’ derives, meant not 100 but 120. 

9. “Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.” (Albert Einstein). 

10. “Mathematics [is] the subject in which we never know what we are talking about nor whether what we are saying is true.” (Bertrand Russell).