I recently came across the following in a Sunday newspaper: The Government is expected to announce a major overhaul of mathematics teaching in the next few days and it will be writing to employers and teaching bodies to ask how the subject can be ‘made more relevant to the twenty-first century.1 This suggests that mathematics, with its privileged position in the core curriculum, had assumed its relevance to be selfevident but that it now needs to be shaken out of its apparent complacency. It presents a sharp contrast to history teaching, where survival in the options system has, for a long time, reduced any such complacency. Even so, there are plenty of...