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aluminium aluminum z or zed and removing used from certain words or not among the many discrepancies
between american and british english perhaps none conjures as much religious further as
math versus maths so which one is correct maths obviously not really you're going to get a full
explanation but maybe it is who knows you'll have to keep watching won't you well really neither is
technically more correct than the other it's all just language and conventions different
groups of people want to use at the end of the day language is all about communicating effectively
and the rules that surround it are meant to serve that end not language serving as the
rules and conventions contrary it's what many many an individual who refuses to accept the
evolution of language might otherwise try to have you believe as nobody is likely to get confused at
all what someone is trying to say when they say math or maths and saying one or the other is
the accepted way to do it among two rather large groups of english speakers the idea of saying one
is definitely right and one is wrong is well it's a little bit rich isn't it but look that's
not particularly interesting so let's stoke the flames of the fire a little bit and see if we can
shed some light on how this particular difference between american and british english came to be
to begin with which was first math or maths turns out while you'll often read that the math lovers
of the world win this one this isn't actually correct though it is true that even in the uk
it's not been until the last half century or so that saying maths was more common than math but to
start with math as an abbreviation for mathematics dates back to at least as early as june the 4th
1847 when w g hammond wrote in his diary it rained so that we had a math lesson indoors again it's
commonly stated that maths is a later invention first attested to in 1911 in a letter from english
soldier and poet wilfred edward salter owen where he wrote the answers to maths quess were given us
all this morning it is next seen again after this in 1917 in a september edition of wireless world
with extremely rusty in maths however it turns out there is a much earlier known instance of
someone writing maths interestingly occurring in america in his letter from the secretary
of war written by war secretary john c calhoun in 1818 a man referred to as chs davies is listed as
ass prof maths there is also a third variation of this popping up in 8 36 where it states edward c
ward prof of maths maths also appears in the merit role of the cadets of the virginia military
institute published sometime around 1854. it turns out one tc rice and p h warsham were to
quote deficient in maths no doubt had they known over a century and a half later they'd be called
out in this very public way and it would be all anyone would ever remember of them they would
have studied just a bit harder in any event in these cases the apostrophe simply functions as
the placeholder for the missing letters between the mass and the s it should be noted here that
through all these early variations of math maths and maths with an apostrophe it's not thought
people actually pronounced the abbreviations this way instead just using it as a shorthand way to
write mathematics which would then be spoken fully similar to how you'd say professor rather than
prof when encountering the abbreviation prof as in the previous example except for me who did it
for your benefit which was weird it wouldn't be until around the mid-20th century that it
appears people actually started to use math and maths as proper spoken words rather than just a
written abbreviation unsurprisingly for no known reason even though both were used on either side
of the pond for a time the math version of the abbreviation ended up being more popular than its
plural sounding maths in the united states whereas eventually the opposite was true in the uk however
it's also noteworthy that it wouldn't be until around the 1970s that maths would overtake math
as the proper form in the uk before that usage was a bit more mixed on that end of the pond
this all brings us to the argument often leveled at the pro-math speakers of the world as the
definitive reason people should say maths and not math that mathematics is plural thus its
abbreviation should be as well beyond the tenuous supposition that an abbreviation of something
plural must inherently also be in plural form those who say maths don't say my favorite subjects
are maths they say my favorite subject is maths although why anyone would say that is a mystery
similarly there is no such thing as a mathematic to have more than one of or at least not anymore
at one point mathematic was more or less used to describe a polymath but the main point being that
mathematics is not a counting noun while you might say i have two mathematics classes you'd never say
i have two mathematics there is just the broad field of study known as mathematics similar
to how we have physics linguistics and economics in these latter cases nobody says econs or
lings even if they're going to shorten the words they say econ and ling physics is another
beast altogether as to our knowledge nobody verbally abbreviates it and even if it was
fizz it wouldn't be clear whether the person was contracting the ending s or simply including the
fourth letter though the idea of calling a part of science biz is rather appealing isn't it despite
all this particularly when querying humans of the british persuasion folk etymology tends to lead
said individuals to assume that despite their own usage demonstrating the contrary mathematics must
be plural because the trailing s it may even be that this idea is the reason the s was originally
tacked on at the end of the abbreviation in the first place with some individuals thinking
mathematics was plural despite common usage there is some evidence in support of this where around
the time these abbreviations started to pop up you'll find a few instances of people actually
treating mathematics as plural for example in baldwin and craddock's library of useful
knowledge mathematics published in 1836 they say now the mathematics are peculiarly well adapted
for this purpose in truth mathematics is simply a mass noun like music water faculty garbage
furniture evidence humanity luggage that has an s on the end similar to physics or economics and
again it's considered uncountable and generally treated as singular in the way that it is used
although it is noteworthy that some mass nouns that refer to a group of something like faculty
can go either way in usage for instance the media is sensationalizing the news or the media
are sensationalizing the news but unfortunately for the mathematics is plural crowd other than a
few isolated instances in very recent times likely stemming from the misconception that mathematics
is plural it's long been the case that mathematics has been almost universally treated as singular
in common usage now you might at this point be wondering if mathematics is not plural how did
that s get there in the first place well there seems to be some debate here this seems to have
come about owing to a common convention around the time that mathematics first popped up in english
where it was on vogue to use a plural name for different fields of study such as economics
linguistics physics acoustics etc the practice seems to have been adopted borrowing from the
related terms in ancient greek like physica or in this case mathematica but at the end of the day
both math and maths are just abbreviations for mathematics that turned into proper words with
some choosing to go with the contracted version of the abbreviation instead of the shorter
math and it just sort of catching on one way or another from there neither math nor maths is more
correct than the other in the general case though if you happen to be writing for an audience that
you know predominantly uses maths you should go with that and vice versa unless you're
just one of those people who likes watching the world burn and either way well god help
you if you're a british person working with many american scriptwriters and talking to a worldwide
audience on a platform particularly known for commenters with no filter the problem of math
versus maths oh boy it's just the tip of the iceberg for that sorry individual bonus facts long
before math was being used as an abbreviation for mathematics and then becoming its own proper word
in old english it meant mowing or more aptly cutting grass or other such crops mathematics
didn't actually come to mean just arithmetic until around the 18th to early 19th century before that
it included many fields of study including astrology music arithmetic and even optics
astrology the difference in usage to the present definition is the root of the
misunderstanding about saint augustine's advice that christians should steer clear
of mathematically he wasn't referring to those studying mathematics as we think of it
but rather astrologers now that makes more sense so i really hope you did enjoy today's video if
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you