No.127
subtract 20%. Multiply by 1.2 and
multiply by 0.8.’ I’m sure the pair
of you, grown prosperous on the
manipulation of compound interest
we taught you at Winchester, still do
it the Funky way: 1.2 × 0.8 = 0.96, so a
4% decrease.
The Algebra Wars would not have
been so prolonged had the anti-
Funkies - Colin Upton (86-09) and
Peter Krakenberger (73-13) were the
vanguard - not been such successful
teachers. Eventually James Sabben-
Clare (Coll, 54-60; Co Ro, 68-00;
HM, 85-00) asked Stefan Hopkinson
(Chaplain, 73-90 & Yoda from Star
Wars avant la lettre) to intercede.
Stefan was himself one of the shock
troops in an intellectual war, the
one against sexual hypocrisy. He
had given evidence for the defence
in Regina v Penguin Books, the Lady
Chatterley trial, and his sermons
could be Lawrencian too. In one,
he rejected the thesis that self-abuse
caused blindness and baldness, but
then added - waving his spectacles
and rubbing his bald head - ‘Except in
my case.’ But even Stefan was baffled
by the passions generated by the cold
equations.
John Smith’s reckless courage
reached its zenith when defending
his methods to Dr Nicholas Tate
(HM, 00-03). John had written to
Dr Tate, then Chief Executive of
the Qualifications and Curriculum
Authority, and godfather to the
unlamented AS-level, to explain
that a half-way exam would divorce
calculus and applications, which
Newton had developed in tandem.
He was to have ample opportunity to
make this point directly when Dr Tate
became Headman. To be fair, Tate
had already begun to repent. Sitting
on my sofa in Chawker’s he said, ‘It
has become clear that the big mistake
in A-level reform was modularisation.
That took place during a period when
I was out of the office.’ Meanwhile
his Mathmã department defied
his AS exam by having up to 12 of
somebody-else’s modules examined
The Trusty Servant
at the end. Funky was summoned
to Moberly Court and told the
department would examine AS in the
usual way. Readers should voice John
Smith’s rejoinder in the nasal accents
of the East Riding. ‘Or not.’
And we didn’t.
QUESTION 7.
Factorise 3x 2 + 7x − 10.
There is a ‘magic method’, beloved of
the anti-Funkies, and I have left it for
my last reader, stood on the burning
deck whence all but you have fled.
I’m looking for two numbers that
multiply to make and add to make 7.
Got them! –3 and 10. Now split the
middle term according to the magic
numbers: 3x 2 + 7x − 10 = 3x 2 − 3x +
10x − 10. Now factorise each half
using common factors: 3x(x−1)+10(x
−1). A common factor has magically
appeared: 3x 2 + 7x 10=(x − 1)(3x + 10).
As John Smith’s bitterest opponent
said, ‘The boys should have a method
that always works, no matter how
hard the quadratic is.’ Of course,
nobody who is any good at mathmā
uses the magic method at home. You
and I write (x )(3x ) think of two
numbers that multiply to 10, stick
them in, multiply out to check (without
requiring the intermediate working,
which was the point of Question 2)
and all done in five seconds; yet they
teach the laborious magic method
all over the world, except perhaps in
a corner of Uganda that is forever
Funky.
John Smith’s departure for Lake
Victoria brought a truce in the
Algebra Wars. Hugh Hill (83-17) saw
merit in letting excellent classroom
teachers do what they thought best.
We appointed some practitioners
of the magic method, and boys
even found it was safe to bellow
SOHCAHTOA again. I saw John
Durran the day before he died, but
we didn’t talk about algebra. Instead
he vouchsafed an account of his first
brush with Mark Stephenson (Co
Ro, 59-90; Fellow, 92-96), in a 1950s
blizzard outside the roughhouse they
4
were to share, but, like the Giant Rat
of Sumatra, it is a story for which the
world is not yet prepared.
And for some ten years it has been
the turn of the last in the apostolic
succession from Thwaites and
Durran. Peter Cornish arrived
in 1987, having beaten me to his
previous job at Haberdasher’s
Monmouth on the spurious grounds
that he played the clarinet better
than I played Rugby football. He is
as admiring as I am of the approach
of John Smith, and he found in Paul
McMaster (Coll, 76-80; Co Ro, 90-),
himself the pupil of John Durran,
a highly effective assassin. In fact,
McMaster is Funky-cubed because he
doesn’t let the boys touch a calculator
until they’re in V Book. The mildest
of men (except when his teams are 3-3
at Eton going in to ‘Fergie time’) Paul
won the Algebra Wars without having
to bomb the enemy back to the
Stone Age. He has given us hundreds
of questions, each as imaginative
and ingenious a miniature as the
illuminated initials in the Winchester
Bible. Done right, they are effortless,
with no need for a calculator; done
wrong and they are impossible to
finish in the time. These questions
honour the heroes of post-Sputnik
Mathmā, Sir Bryan Thwaites, John
Durran and John Smith, and all my
colleagues in the department that
Peter Cornish has led, and I dedicate
the last question, one of Paul’s, to the
Funky Preacher who fixed my algebra,
to the SMP, and to you, my remaining
reader. Remember it is for JP at
Christmas, is to be done in seconds,
and no calculator!
QUESTION 8.
A right-angled triangle has
hypotenuse 169 and another side has
length 119. What is the length of the
third side?