New maths master raising the bar

Tim Brown is ready to take up the fight for better maths education for those who are missing out.

Tim Brown takes the reins as director of the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute next month. Picture: David Geraghty

University of Melbourne data science professor Tim Brown takes over as director of the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute next month and is ready to take up the fight for better maths education for those who are missing out.

He replaces Geoff Prince, who has led AMSI for nearly a decade, and picks up the major programs developed on Professor Prince’s watch such as Choose Maths, the effort to get more high school students to take maths subjects, particularly girls (who are less likely to study maths) and students in regional areas, where shortages of maths teachers are particularly acute.

Professor Brown is a maths evangelist who says he believes that improving the maths and statistics expertise of school students and university graduates is critical to Australia’s future.

One of his key priorities is to lift the standard of maths teaching in schools.

“The decline in international tests (by school students) has been severe and that won’t be fixed until we have a much better qualified teacher workforce in mathematics,” he said.

Although Professor Brown is a former deputy vice-chancellor (at La Trobe University) and a former dean of the science faculty at the Australian National University, he is critical of universities for largely removing the requirement that students pass calculus level maths in Year 12 if they want to do courses such as science, engineering, information technology and commerce.

“There is a fear in many universities that if they are requiring an appropriate level of mathematics they will lose students and, with that, funding,” Professor Brown said.

“It’s not a simple problem but it’s a really important problem, and it does require us to keep making the case that it’s essential for Australia’s fut­ure that we have mathematically and statistically qualified students.”

The high-level jobs in the coming decades would demand it, he said, naming areas such as finance, commerce, the new field of bioinformatics and his own field of data science.

AMSI is a group of universities, research agencies, government bodies and professional organisations that teach maths at university level or use and advocate for it.

It has a partnership with the BHP Foundation to fund the Choose Maths program in schools.

Professor Brown said it was a crucial project to end the underrepresentation of women in the mathematical sciences workforce.

AMSI also runs APR.Intern to give PhD students from any discipline practical work experience as researchers in business.

“This will be a key role for me in trying to secure longer-term funding for these initiatives,” Professor Brown said.