Entering a new gallery in London鈥檚 Science Museum, a dangling Handley Page Gugnunc aeroplane hits you full on, the dramatic motion of air flowing over its wings captured by elegant white waves. The plane was constructed in 1929 for a competition to build safe aircraft, with mathematics at the heart of its design.
No surprises there: after all, this is the multimillion pound new created by . It鈥檚 flashy, but contemporary; over the top, yet understated. In many ways, it鈥檚 a work of art itself.
But the rationale behind the gallery is even more important than that. A few years ago, a Science Museum survey found . The museum already had a maths gallery, but discovered that to win over the public it needed to show how the subject impacts and benefits our lives.
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鈥淢athematics has always been at the heart of everything that we care about 鈥� life and death, war and peace, money, trade, travel, beauty 鈥� and that is what this gallery is about,鈥� says curator .
By showcasing mathematics at its most useful and relevant, the gallery is trying to draw in even those with little interest in the subject. Among its treasures are a 17th-century Islamic astrolabe used to map the night sky, an Enigma code-making machine from the second world war, Charles Babbage鈥檚 difference engine and a protractor that can solve differential equations.
Early AI
It even shows an early attempt at artificial intelligence in the form of the WISARD pattern-recognition machine that tried to recreate the way the brain deals with patterns. The same ideas inspire the machine learning algorithms of Google and Facebook today.
鈥淭he gallery shows that maths is beautiful, alive and real. We want to see more people recognising mathematics in every aspect of their lives,鈥� says Chris Hayhurst from , one of the gallery鈥檚 sponsors.
I would agree 鈥� I loved everything. But then I am a maths junkie. Many non-enthusiasts are unlikely to find the gallery a stepping stone into that beautiful world, it鈥檚 just too dry.
To draw people in, you have to make mathematics come alive in spectacular ways, and many of the 120 exhibits (seriously slimmed down from the old gallery, by the way) fail to do this because the whole presentation is still old school. Archive footage of the Thames flood barrier and historical measuring devices just don鈥檛 do it for most people.
Likewise, there is hardly any movement in the gallery because many of the machines are simply too fragile to run constantly. For better or worse, we鈥檝e all got used to lashings of interaction. So where are the touchscreens displaying virtual versions of the best machines for visitors to play with? Preferably with real-life models running alongside them?
Instead, everything is left to the imagination and that only works if you start out with a mathematical imagination. Maths is at the heart of everything we care about, but many of the gallery鈥檚 visitors would never guess that.
