Apathy Sketchpad

A new report by the independent think tank Reform says that the number of maths graduates in Britain has fallen from 84,744 in 1989 to 60,093 in 2007. That’s a loss of 24,651 in only 18 years, or 43.4 microHertz. If this trend continues then we will have no mathematicians at all by the year 2,050.87952, and by 2,075 there will be -33,033 mathematics graduates. Since a mathematics graduate is expected to contribute an extra £3,080 per year to the economy, this will represent an annual cost of over one hundred megapounds per year. That level of spending would exhaust all the Earth’s money in only 30,000 years, meaning that the world’s economies will be at the mercy of the huge amount of negative mathematicians.

Something must be done.