Prof Hugh Pennington: Our national numeracy level is a simple disgrace

One of my most memorable medical teachers, Dr Herbert Barrie, died on 20 March. I remember him as an ardent pioneer in the care of premature babies. When he started, success was so rare that after each one he gave his team Champagne.

Scotland cant blame Westminster for its educational failings

He never worked in Scotland, but the influence of his work on the treatment of the asphyxiated newborn was equally strong on both sides of the Border.

A post-dated Scottish link was his work with Ian Donald, best remembered today for developing ultrasound imaging in Glasgow. Donald built on the know-how from its use in the shipyards and he joined with the local firm, Kelvin Hughes, to make the best ultrasonic obstetric scanner in the world.

Before coming to Glasgow in 1955 as Regius Professor of Midwifery, Donald had worked, like Barrie, at St Thomas’s Hospital. In London, Donald developed the electronics of the mechanical infant ventilator needed for success.

Barrie’s family fled Berlin in 1936. Twelve close relatives were Holocaust victims. His mother came from Lwow,in Poland (now Lviv, in the Ukraine). “The Scottish Book” was written there. It contains 193 important and difficult mathematical conjectures discussed by members of the Lwow school of mathematics, originally scribbled on the marble topped tables of Kawarnia Szkocka, the Scottish Café, a big coffee house in Lwow.

Some of the mathematicians were world class. Particularly important were Stefan Banach and Stanislaw Ulam. Ulam’s doings at the Café became known in the US. From 1935 he visited Princeton and Harvard every year. In 1939 the US consul said that to save time he should upgrade his visitor visas to an immigrant’s. He got it, just before the window closed. It saved his life. Banach was not so lucky.

After the occupation of Lwow in 1941 by the Germans, to survive as a Polish intellectual he had to become a louse feeder. The best vaccine against typhus fever at that time was made by the intra-rectal inoculation of lice. The only way to grow them was in boxes strapped to the legs of volunteers. The SS kept their distance.

In November 1943 Ulam joined the Manhattan Project. He played a key role in the development of the H-bomb. At Los Alamos he developed the Monte Carlo statistical method, an essential tool today in weather forecasting.

All this supports Anton Chekhov: “There is no national science, just as there is no national multiplication table.” Still, our national numeracy is a disgrace. Who has succeeded like Sir Henry Craik and Sir John Struthers, the formidable Scottish education administrators of a century ago? Certainly not our recent cabinet secretaries.

Craik’s book “The State in its Relation to Education” quotes the 1888 Treasury funding formula; 11/80ths of the English allocation to Scotland, more than our population share. The Barnett formula has favoured us even more. Don’t blame Westminster as we lag behind Estonia and Slovenia in our Pisa maths score!

Professor Hugh Pennington is an emeritus professor of bacteriology, University of Aberdeen