The Failure of Mathematics?

The Failure of Mathematics?

Mathematics has come in for criticism recently, that somehow it was the root cause of the credit crunch and the collapse of the world economy. It was the misuse of mathematics, by bosses who didn’t understand it, that got us into the mire.

Actually, bosses do possess the tools; they simply refuse to use them. And then we wonder when it goes wrong.

The refusal to take mathematics seriously is the cause of all sorts of errors.

• We assume things are static when they are dynamic.
• We assume relationships between variables to be linear (and predictable) when they are not.
• We ignore ranges of possibility and use single-point average values instead—the flaw of averages.
• We assume that different uncertainties are independent, and get caught by surprise when we discover they are not.
• We confuse cause and symptom and treat the latter, and are surprised when the former does not go away.
• We assume that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
• We let vanishingly small risks bias our perception of the world (and let unwarranted fear guide our behavior), whilst ignoring the everyday risks that kill lots of us all the time.

The mathematics is sound. It’s the application that’s at fault. The failure of mathematicians—but not, —is to let get away with it.