Li Xing

Numbers do not always reflect value

By Li Xing (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-06-29 06:25

Numbers are "basic element(s) of mathematics used for counting, measuring, solving equations, and comparing quantities," according to the online Concise Encyclopaedia Britannica.

In almost every aspect of our society, numbers are also used to evaluate work, academic and administrative performances.

Students are naturally judged, mostly by their test scores.

Teachers and researchers who wish to climb the academic ladder must publish certain numbers of scholarly papers.

Numbers themselves are impartial. However, they don't always reflect genuine value.

For instance, an English-language teacher from Fuyang in East China's Anhui Province obtained the top ranking for a high school teacher because he had published numerous essays and even several books on teaching English in Chinese high schools. With that title, he is able to make his way up into some sort of national committee for English teaching, according to the results of an online search and a leading high school in Beijing.

However, his signature work, entitled "How to Teach English in Mother Tongue," is in itself questionable. It preaches the memorization of numeric or lettered drills that he has devised in Chinese which have little to do with English language itself.

In one class, which my daughter attended, he asked his students to answer a few multiple-choice questions. For one problem, my daughter selected C, but the correct answer was B. When my daughter asked him why her choice was wrong, he couldn't explain it and merely repeated why B was the correct.

For some time, scientists who want to measure up have been required to gain a certain number citations in the Science Citation Index (SCI).

Records from this internationally registered system were deemed important as it provides some form of international recognition by summarizing "bibliographic information, author abstracts, and cited references" from 3,700 of the world's leading scholarly science and technical journals covering more than 100 disciplines, according to Thomsonscientific.com.

That was why some people questioned whether Yuan Longping, the father of Chinese hybrid-rice whose research has helped relieve possible the hunger of hundreds of millions of people, should deserve the national science and technology award, because Yuan had not been cited in the SCI.

For five years, Zhu Xiping, professor of mathematics at Guangzhou-based Zhongshan University, did not publish a single research paper. However, early this month, Professor Zhu, in collaboration with Professor Cao Huaidong from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, published a 300-page paper, putting the final pieces into one of the world's so-called toughest mathematical jigsaws.

Professor Zhu emphasized that what he and Professor Cao had accomplished was based on the tremendous work done by Richard Hamilton, professor of mathematics at Columbia University, and Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman.

All the above illustrates that numbers should not be the only criteria for evaluating people's work and performance.

However, in our society, numbers have played such a dominant role in appraisals that they have partly contributed to plagiarism, cheating and the neglect of comprehensive judgment.

For instance, a certain young scholar was praised by the media for publishing a huge amount of books and papers. Then a few people with mathematical minds carefully calculated the number of words in the so-called publications and discovered that the young man couldn't possibly have made this accomplishment. He was later found to be copying and pasting from others' works.

Government agencies at various levels also use numbers, for instance, GDP figures, to show how well they have carried out their administrative duties.

But if the figures do not take into account, for instance, the loss of human lives or the amount of environmental pollution or the impact of pollution and other damages to nature, the earth and our heritage, they cannot measure the true value of what we have accomplished so far.

Email: lixing@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 06/29/2006 page4)