Coronavirus has made amateur mathematicians of us all

‘What is the point of learning maths? When do you ever actually need it? How does it ever affect your life?’ That’s the frequent complaint of my school-age children, labouring over their times tables and number bonds. It was my complaint as I struggled to tell median from mean, or sine from cosine.

Well. Now we have a nation and a world bewitched and terrified in equal measure by a ground-level demonstration of what an exponential function does. Our entire society is being shaped for a generation by that elegant, predictable, horrifyingly steepening curve. One shred of comfort in this catastrophe is the thought that no journalist will ever again write ‘increasing exponentially’ as a fancy-sounding way of saying ‘increasing a lot’.

Coronavirus has made amateur mathematicians of us all. Like many people, I’m gripped by the nightly bulletins of the FT’s data–visualisation reporter John Burn-Murdoch — who posts lucid graphs comparing infection rates and death rates globally. JB-M fans are all, by now, hip to why he’s using logarithmic scales on the Y-axis. The last mathmo I remember getting excited about was the psephologist Nate Silver, after he called the 2008 and 2012 US presidential elections. Before that, it was crypto that was sexy: there was Alan Turing and — in more recherché circles — little fan clubs for Pretty Good Privacy’s Phil Zimmermann and Bitcoin’s Satoshi Nakamoto. But cometh the hour, cometh the geek.

And in a situation that is so wide and so complex, so impossible to take in as a gestalt from the welter of anecdotes and assertions, so remote in its entire truth from any single person’s experience, the mathematical abstraction of this sort of bulletin has a thrilling clarity. Mathematical models help you to feel like you have a handle on what’s going on.