INTRODUCTION

Staff at this institution try to popularise mathematics in a number of ways. One is by visits to high schools, particularly those in rural areas, where talks are given on careers in mathematics other than teaching, and students are involved in a problem solving exercise in the style of Polya's film on guessing. Another method is Open Days and Information Evenings where the public can view and touch and have explained some of the research and consulting projects of the staff.

Another approach evolved when the writer was invited to speak at a local Rotary meeting as a last-minute replacement for a celebrity! The audience was bound to be disappointed with the absence of a real “personality”, and even more with his replacement by an academic. Australian businessmen have a sometimes justified mistrust of “egg-heads”.

My brief, if I accepted was to speak for 20 to 30 minutes, to make it interesting and to allow for some questions at the end. What could I talk about to a mixed well-fed audience, many of whom probably had unhappy memories of their own school mathematics and uneasy bewilderment of what their children were learning?

My professional work at the time ranged from teaching a class of first year students repeating a biometrics course to struggling with a nonhomogeneous, nonlinear recurrence relation with a research student. There was enough gloom around without using these as a starting point.