Equations in a consumer culture: mathematical images in advertising

Affect energises the learning and use of mathematics; a key influence comes from the images of mathematics available in society. We sought advertisements containing such ‘images’ (e.g. mathematical expressions, equations or graphs) in 1600 editions of UK newspapers, over two recent three-month periods. We found that 4.7% of editions included a ‘mathematical’ advert, compared with 1.7% found in the pilot for 1994-2003. This supports the idea that mathematical images are being used more in advertising, paralleling the increase observed anecdotally in films. The incidence varied from 8.2% among the ‘quality’ papers, to 2.3% in mid-market, to 0.6% among the ‘populars’, suggesting a correlation with the social class of the readershi