All things fall apart . . . well they will if we keep valuing literacy at the expense of numeracy, writes Donald Clarke

THE NEWS that more than 5,000 Leaving Cert candidates managed to fail their maths exams has, understandably enough, sent business leaders and education analysts into a frenzy of hair-tearing and teeth-gnashing.

We have a century or so to go before robots rule the planet and, in the interim, these innumerate dunderheads are going to have to build our bridges, design our trains and formulate our pharmaceuticals.

What a gruesome prospect.

The massed despair among the chatterers is, however, of a different character to that which emerges when some report declares too few children can speak Irish or recite romantic poetry. The impending crisis for industry is worth fretting about, but one wonders why so few seem to care that a generation is being denied (or is denying itself) the illumination and intellectual excitement that comes with understanding mathematics. Like the Irish language and romantic poetry, maths is, surely, worth studying for its own sake.

The pool from which media fulminators are drawn is overstocked with graduates from the humanities who, in their college days, enjoyed caricaturing science students as greasy oiks in bad duffel coats. Now, as adults, not only are they hopelessly ill-informed about organic chemistry and contour integrals, but they seem positively proud of that over-trumpeted ignorance.

You think this an exaggeration? Well, think back to the conversations that surrounded the publication of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Timein 1988. It rapidly became an axiom of the commentariat that no decent person had ever got through it.

I was hopeless at maths at school, Betty Cushy-Degree might say. The moment I see an equation, my brain turns to feathers and cheese.

Folk who would never admit they are confused by all those long words in Shakespeare, or that history is far too complicated for their silly little heads, positively rejoice in announcing their inability to grasp the most rudimentary of scientific concepts.

Weirdly, such people seem to believe that ignorance in one field only confirms their erudition in another.

When, as a student of mathematics at Trinity College, Dublin, I joined forces with a physics boffin to form an experimental, post-Krautrock band entitled The Levi-Civita Symbol, contemporaries with no knowledge of maths labelled me a pretentious lunatic. They were, of course, absolutely correct. Naming your band for an important term from tensor calculus is an act of unforgivable indulgence, but nobody much minded when The Fall took their name from a novel by Albert Camus or Josef K drew on a book by Franz Kafka.

Camus and Kafka count as cultural icons, you see. In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out I also studied English.

CP Snow, the English physicist and novelist, addressed this issue in a famous 1959 lecture entitled The Two Cultures. He explained how he had too frequently found himself in the company of people who, after making it clear that they felt themselves supremely well-educated, would bemoan the supposed illiteracy of scientists.

Once or twice, I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the law of entropy, Snow wrote. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet he was asking the scientific equivalent of: "Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?"

Snow would, surely, have despaired at the imbalance in the mainstream Irish media's attitudes towards the nation's most lauded writers and its greatest scientists. Unless I am making it up, North Great George's Street in Dublin was recently renamed JoyceWorld. Beckett is on tea towels. Yeats has his own lunchboxes.

Compare all this with the relative obscurity that still surrounds William Rowan Hamilton. To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the great Irish mathematician's birth, the State did attempt to rename 2005 "Hamilton Year" but, a few fine articles in this newspaper aside, the media paid little more attention than it did to International Sausage Day or Wear Culottes to Work Week.

We could point out that, without Hamilton's discovery of the quaternion, the computer graphics in Grand Theft Auto IVwould be a lot harder to achieve, but such campaigns reek of condescension and a gruesome desire to Make Science Fun!

Here's a suggestion. Henceforth, let's express shame rather than pride when we admit to ignorance of the Second Law of Thermodynamics or A Brief History of Time. There's nothing big or clever about being stupid.

Would you really prefer to drive across bridges designed by people who, though well-versed in the plays of Christopher Marlowe, somehow contrived to fail foundation-level maths in their Leaving Cert? I thought not.

Garret FitzGerald is on leave