Science and Innovation

Specialising in mathematics and its didactics, Guido Ramellini is one of the regular participants in the Science Festival, along with other members of the Mathematics Museum of Catalonia (MMACA), based in Cornellà de Llobregat and of which he is co-creator. We talked to him about his links with the Science Festival, the dissemination and teaching of mathematics, and how mathematics relates to society.

You studied biology, but ended up taking up mathematics. How did you become interested in mathematics?

When I started studying biological sciences at the University of Milan in 1970, I immediately saw that the classes I was most interested in were given by teachers who incorporated a lot of mathematics. The natural sciences were no longer just descriptive but predictive, and a new scientific paradigm was emerging.

And when did you decide to become a mathematician?

My first professional contact with mathematics was while I was working in Molecular Biology at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Milan. The most prestigious scientific journals asked for a confidence check of the experimental results. As I was the youngest in the team, I was sent to the Institute of Medical Statistics to learn computer programming and take on that role. Later, I became a secondary school teacher of mathematics, physics, chemistry and natural sciences. I was already working at the Italian Lyceum in Madrid when the Local Society of Mathematics Teachers was formed, dedicated to an Italian teacher, Emma Castelnuovo. I started to collaborate and realised that I lacked specific knowledge. Then I enrolled in a postgraduate distance learning course at the University of Rome on Didactics of Mathematics and I was hooked.

What got you hooked?

I discovered that didactics allowed you to transform mathematics. From being the most selective and discriminating subject, you were able to realise an opportunity to integrate different intelligences and enjoy having solved challenges, a very satisfying ethical, aesthetic and pragmatic experience. And this continues thirty years later.

The MMACA is a recurrent participant in the Science Festival. What does participating each year bring to it?

Apart from bringing back some “historical” activities for young children, who are an audience often forgotten by scientific institutions, we usually experiment with new materials. This year the proposals we are bringing are from an exhibition we are creating within the European project SMEM. Significant Mathematics for Early Mathematicians, aimed at students from 3 to 8 years old. As the name says, we are convinced that there is no such thing as small mathematics or small mathematicians, and that the proposals for this age range involve exercising, more or less consciously, important basic skills.

How do you manage to arouse the interest of the general public? Is mathematics engaging?

All the proposals are presented as challenges, easy or more complicated, which require different conversations. To begin with, with the material, which must be attractive and approachable. Then with the teaching staff, who accompany but do not guide; who do not answer questions, but guide personal research. And then (this is the most important), the conversation with other users. In this way, there is a playful component (not gamified) that makes one of our mottos possible: “it is never too late to have a happy childhood”. From what we have seen over the years, there are two types of people: those who like mathematics and those who do not yet know that they like mathematics.

What is people’s response to the mathematical challenges that you usually bring to the Festival?

I’ll be a bit cryptic and leave you the challenge of interpreting my words: we have a response of spontaneous happiness from all the users: children, families, children and older children… a response of spontaneous happiness, a happiness found and not sought or constructed, because it is the place and the time for it to be normal to be happy.

What do you learn from your audience?

The Science Festival gives us more time to interact with the users than the exhibitions, where we try to be much quieter. The versions of the materials we bring to the Festival are different from those of the exhibitions. For example, we can dare to bring challenges that have no solution because we can recover, through dialogue, the mystery and fascination behind an impossible challenge. In an exhibition, an impossible challenge only creates frustration and we avoid them.

How do you value the Science Festival?

We are very convinced that scientific thinking and experiences should be part of the baggage of every citizen of any age, culture or attitude who wants to be the protagonist of his or her own life. That is why it is necessary for the Festival to be consolidated in the territory and to have continuity throughout the period between one and the next. Barcelona has some very interesting structures (museums, libraries, social centres…). The offer of scientific experiences should have a greater presence and exploit all languages.

It is also a place to meet people and experiences, to get ideas, to propose collaborations and, obviously, to present our proposals to new people.

Where did the idea of creating a mathematics museum come from?

The idea came from a group of teachers who for years brought materials to their maths class and saw how their pedagogical impact was relegated to the walls of their classroom. Although it had a long history and noble fathers and mothers (Montessori, Decroly, Piaget, Vygotsky, Freudenthal, Castelnuovo, Puig Adam and Maria Antònia Canals, among many others) the number of practitioners of this option of manipulative experimentation was relegated to a small group of teachers. We thought that this dynamic impulse should come from outside the school environment.

And how did you do it?

Two or three research papers – from when teachers had, albeit only once in a lifetime, that opportunity, lost with the crisis and never found again – on games and materials were the inspirational core. In 2000, the International Year of Mathematics, they represented the first experiences. The network of mathematics teachers’ associations and, in particular, FEEMCAT (the federation of the five Catalan organisations) gave us the necessary support so that the first exhibitions, whose proposals would now be too short, were a success. The presence of an active, dedicated and organised teaching staff (which the whole world envies!) allowed us and still allows us to take the travelling exhibition to many places in Catalonia and abroad at very affordable costs.

It must be said that we share this nomadic origin with many of the world’s leading mathematics museums, such as Mathematikum in Giessen or Momath in New York.

How did you come to Cornellà?

In a street conversation we discovered that Cornellà Town Council had a flat in the Palau Mercader that had been renovated and was missing its purpose. We set out, we saw it and, under the astonished gaze of the local authorities, in less than a fortnight we opened the permanent exhibition. In our naivety, we thought it was like opening just another travelling exhibition, only to find that we were dealing with a reality and demands that were growing at a dizzying rate. We took advantage of every possible corner of the palace and, especially, the surrounding park. We have had the help of the other nearby structures and the unconditional support of the City Council, which had never expected to receive almost a hundred thousand visitors every year in the space it gave us and to make Cornellà an international reference point in the field of mathematics education.

What stage are you at now?

The next step is the agreement signed this spring in which the City Council has given us the use of one of the warehouses that are being refurbished in Can Bagueria. It is a space of 1,500 square metres in which we will transfer the activities aimed at the schools. In the Palau Mercader we will maintain the activities related to families, so that we do not lose the festive atmosphere that we experience every Sunday in an area where cultural, leisure and economic initiatives of proximity have multiplied.

As a society, do we lack a mathematical culture?

As a society, we lack culture, full stop! Mathematics is an important part, although it is often forgotten, but it is neither self-sufficient nor isolated from the other languages that allow us to better understand the world in which we live, to respect it and to preserve it for future generations and the rest of the living world. In mathematics there is art, craftsmanship, beauty, poetry… and also logic and technique. But I could say the same about music or painting. If I have to point out a peculiarity, I would say that mathematics is the art of identifying and (trying) to solve problems. And as our society is a problem factory, a discipline that uses more head than belly would help to eliminate from social equations the factors linked to induced emotions and look for possible and effective solutions instead of presumed culprits, witches or heretics.

Some people seem to have problems with mathematics….

No one frivolously declares themselves “illiterate”. On the other hand, mathematical illiteracy can be presumed. “As mathematics is a useless bore, I, the clever one, the aesthete, the rebel, have rejected it and live like a king”. We should start fighting all the cretinism in these statements, but I’m afraid we’ll run out of stutterers, in-laws and gay jokes first.

The point is that everyone can learn mathematics, like learning English or music, although not everyone will be able or interested in becoming a professional musician, translator or mathematician. It is much more interesting that many more people learn to appreciate a Bach song, a Miles Davis song, a poem by Silvia Plath, the laws of statistics or the function of chlorophyll.

Does it depend on how they are taught?

Schools have an essential role to play. Teachers need to be better trained, both in the initial phase (master’s degree) and during their teaching career, and experimentation needs to be encouraged. It is necessary to use technology intelligently and to present open proposals, stimulating the resolution of challenges, creativity, conversation, the verification of results, the richness of mistakes. But it is society as a whole that must take on the role of educating and not just delegate it to schools.

How should it do so?

The same effort invested in equipping schools with computers should be made to create maths workshops, classrooms equipped with generic materials (for example, those in the Creamat suitcases). Outside the school, the Pedagogical Resource Centres (CRP) should be strengthened, providing them with sufficient and specific staff and motivating materials (for example, the MMACA suitcases). Non-formal education initiatives and especially those of non-commercial entities should be strengthened. Support should be given to teachers’ associations and their initiatives (Estalmat, Anem per més mates, proves Cangur…). And all this must be integrated into a global educational project, which helps to optimise resources.

What needs to be done to reduce the gender gap in mathematics?

To strengthen the communicative aspects, in the hope that more women mathematicians will contribute a different vision of the discipline and the way of doing research. One of the surprises of the experience with the MMACA proposals is that the gender gap is not noticeable, because they encourage collaboration and conversation between users and, in these aspects, girls play an absolutely central role, coming up with good solutions and enriching them with alternatives.

The gap that is still dramatically noticeable is that of the socio-economic conditions of the different types of students, with the aggravating factor that it is not only not decreasing, but increasing.

What role does the media play in the popularisation of mathematics?

There is no doubt that mathematics has become more newsworthy. It is even fashionable. “All the graduates are finding good jobs; there is a shortage of maths teachers; school results are still a nightmare…”. All this has found a place in the media.

The problem remains how these issues are dealt with and how clichés still prevail. It is still more interesting the man who bites the dog than the dog who bites the man, the problems than the solutions, the scandalous case than the thousands of good practices. And when a good experience appears, it seems a unique case, the exception, the fruit of an enlightened person (the Merlí of the moment) and not of a fabric that grows little by little, that needs to be known and recognised to gain strength and become a majority, to find institutional support, to establish itself in the social and citizen sphere, and to make people understand once and for all that the money spent on education (formal, non-formal and informal) are investments and not costs!

As Jorge Wagensberg said in relation to the press: the good result obtained is that, when we invite the speakers to CosmoCaixa, the press come to interview them. The success will be when they stay to hear what they talk about and see the reaction of the public. So I cannot exempt myself from ending with an invitation to the MMACA and accepting the challenges that we will propose to you.

We don’t stop playing because we get old, we get old because we stop playing.