I am grateful to Frank Furedi. Despite his thinly disguised scepticism, he has convinced me that the difficulties almost all second-year physics students experience with the mathematics have nothing to do with mathematics teaching at school, inherently complex ideas or any failure on our part to communicate difficult concepts lucidly. Clearly, we simply have been failing to recognise maths disability when we see it.
B. K. Tanner Chairman of the physics department University of Durham