Maths in Society: The News

Tom Cantillon, Gabriel Coulter, Philipp Von Matuschka

For this project we had to look at the application of maths in newspapers, and the level of schooling required to be able to understand it. We looked at the Weekend Review, a supplement of the Irish Times. As this was more of a lifestyle magazine, we didnt expect to see as much maths content as you would find in the Economist, for example. Our article was entitled Back to College: A Graphical Guide. As you would expect from the title, it was simply a series of statistics and graphs comparing the uptake of different courses, the cost of living away from home vs. at home etc. The graphs themselves were very easy enough to understand, and the information was clear. However, just to be on the safe side, we estimated that you would need to have up to a first years understanding of maths to be able to easily grasp the mathematical concepts presented in todays newspapers. Comparing our findings with those of the rest of the class, it is clear to see that in order to be able to read any non-specialized newspaper, you need only to have a very rudimentary grasp of the concepts of maths. The most common concept in maths that is most often found in the newspapers is statistics, so if you really wanted to, you would be O.K. if all you understood was basic statistics.