The Hon Andrew Leigh MP
Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury
Member for Fenner
Why Maths Matters
Launch of the Grand Mathematics Quiz,
Canberra
1 August 2026
[Acknowledgements omitted.]
I want to start with a story.
In 1787, in the German city of Brunswick, a teacher decided he would keep the class quiet by asking the students to add up all the numbers from 1 to 100. He thought it would buy him a few minutes of peace.
What he hadn't counted on was a remarkable student named Carl Friedrich Gauss.
Gauss spotted a pattern. He realised that 1 plus 100 equals 101. So does 2 plus 99. So does 3 plus 98. There were 50 pairs, each adding to 101. Fifty times 101 is 5,050. Before anyone else had really begun, Gauss had the answer.
Instead of doing a hundred separate additions, he found the pattern that made the problem simple.
We do that every day. Maths is all around us. It powers the devices in our pockets. It helps us forecast the weather. It determines when buses should arrive. It helps us understand challenges such as climate change by modelling what different choices mean for our planet. Maths underpins my own discipline of economics, and it is essential to the design of every major structure, including the modernist Belconnen Library we're in today.
Recognising patterns has been the work of mathematicians for centuries.
In the 1840s, Ada Lovelace saw something that almost nobody else did. Looking at Charles Babbage's design for the Analytical Engine, she realised it could be more than a calculating machine. She imagined a general-purpose computer that could follow instructions to solve many different kinds of problems. In that sense, every laptop and smartphone we use today owes something to Ada Lovelace's extraordinary insight.
Sometimes mathematics saves lives.
During the Second World War, the German Enigma machine was used to encrypt military messages. At Bletchley Park, a team of mathematicians and cryptanalysts, including Alan Turing, developed new methods to help break those codes. Historians still debate exactly how much time this saved, but many estimate it shortened the war by around two years and saved millions of lives.
Turing then went on to lay the foundations of modern computer science. His ideas continue to shape the way we think about computing and artificial intelligence today.
So what you're doing today is engaging with one of humanity's most powerful ways of understanding the world.
I hope you enjoy the challenge. I hope you see every obstacle not as a dead end, but as a clue that the solution may be just around the corner.
May you have fun. May your proofs be consistent. And may your denominators never be zero.
Ends