Maths Problems from History
By Harry Godwin (Y10)
The problems contained in today’s mathematics textbooks are unfailingly anodyne and uncontroversial. This has not always been the case. Ever since education went mainstream in the nineteenth century, government propagandists across the world have recognised the potential of maths textbooks to influence the political views of young, naïve children. In the 1860s America was locked in a brutal civil war, which resulted in the deaths of nearly one million people. On one side were the Yankees- a name derived from Jan Kees, a derogatory term for the cheese-making Dutch settlers who had once lived in the Manhattan area- who stood for an end to slavery and the establishment of a federal government: on the other, the Rebel, who sought to protect the rights of slave owners and to keep the independence of the largely rural South. North Carolina was without doubt a Rebel state. Located some three hundred miles from Washington, the nerve centre of the malevolent Union, its economy was reliant on cotton farming, an industry which could not function without cheap slave labour. And so, when North Carolina’s militia rose up at last against the Yankees, maths textbooks were inexorably weaponised. Here are some examples from Johnson’s Elementary Arithmetic : a) A Rebel soldier captured eight Yankees each day for nine days; how many did he capture in all? b) If one Rebel soldier kills 90 Yankees, how many Yankees, how many Yankees can ten Rebel soldiers kill? c) If one Rebel soldier can whip seven Yankees, how many soldiers can whip 49 Yankees? These bloodthirsty examples, which certainly exaggerate the ability of most Rebel soldiers, are bizarre, or even darkly comic, when viewed through an unprejudiced lens, and go some way towards evoking the contumacious and delusional spirit of the Confederate movement. There are, however, much more alarming examples of politicised arithmetical problems. We need look no further back than eighty years ago, to the weird, terrifying world of Nazi Germany. At the heart of the Nazis’ corrosive ideology was a toxic hatred of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies and several other of Europe’s perpetually abused minorities. No words can describe this following problem, from a textbook issued in the Nazi era: A bomber takes-off with 12 dozen bombs each weighing 10 kilos. The aircraft makes for Warsaw, the heart of international Jewry. It bombs the town. On take- off, with all the bombs on board and a fuel tank containing 1500 kilos of fuel, the aircraft weighs 8 tonnes. When it returns from Warsaw there are still 230 kilos of fuel left. What is the weight of the aircraft when empty?
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