We mathematicians are used to the fact that our subject is widely misunderstood, perhaps more than any other subject (except perhaps linguistics).

The completion of a rigorous course in mathematics - it is not even necessary that the student does well in such a course - appears to be an excellent means of sharpening the mind and developing mental skills that are of general benefit.

We mathematicians are used to the fact that our subject is widely misunderstood, perhaps more than any other subject (except perhaps linguistics).

The human brain finds it extremely hard to cope with a new level of abstraction. This is why it was well into the eighteenth century before mathematicians felt comfortable dealing with zero and with negative numbers, and why even today many people cannot accept the square root of minus-one as a genuine number.

Cardinal arithmetic will be quite important for us, so we spend some time on it. Since, however, it tends to be trivial, we shall not need to spend much of this time on proofs.

In fact, we tend to think things have been getting much worse. In fact, over the last 50 years, almost everything in the world on a global scale has got better. And the way that Hans [ Rosling] did this - it was very good.

Some of the justifiable critiques has been by - been so successful in telling this story, you know, there's a danger of saying, oh, well, you know, we don't need to worry about this because that's absolutely not the case. What [Hans] Rosling is doing is showing us an overall global trend, which in a sense tells us how bad things were - doesn't mean to say the problems are gone, doesn't mean to say they're any less.