Maths was never my thing. I quite enjoyed it at O-level, to the extent that I chose to do it at A-level. As early as the first week of the A-level course, however, it became abundantly clear that the subject was quite beyond me. I simply couldn’t make head or tail of what the teacher was on about.

Looking around at the rest of the class quietly getting on with it, I remember wondering if there had been some primer course over the summer that everyone but me had attended. I just didn’t get it. There didn’t seem to be any certainties any more, rarely anything so straightforward as a........

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