Although the electoral maths is now in its favour, the fiscal arithmetic is less forgiving.
The maths is that simple, even if the conclusion is not what we want to hear.
Imperfect competiton features prominently, for instance, and clever maths is needed to deal with it.
Maths is the most popular subject for the oldest, sixth-form pupils, followed by sciences.
Simple maths is also taught using the calculator function on the mobile phones.
Employers are being asked to help workers boost their numeracy skills amid fears that poor maths is blighting Britain's economic performance.
They also argue that the strongest incentive for students to continue with maths is that it is required for employment or higher education.
"The irony is that while maths is all around us, it seems to have become acceptable to be 'bad with numbers', " Ms Truss said.
It says that the curriculum for maths is over-prescriptive with too narrow a focus and that geography is reduced to a list of "capes, bays, rivers and mountain ranges".
Published in November, the review by former college principal Huw Evans said some employers and universities do not think that a grade C at GCSE English, Welsh and maths is a reliable indicator of literacy and numeracy skills.
Here the maths is unambiguous - we have insufficient budget for the carbon we are already emitting and by the time shale gas is produced in any quantity (five to 10 years), there will be no emissions space left for it.
Meanwhile, the number of newly qualified maths teachers is continuing to rise, going to 2, 014 last year from 1, 849 in 2004.
BBC: NEWS | UK | Education | Trainee teacher failures revealed
She points to research by King's College in London which finds a 16-year-old's understanding of maths today is not as good as it was in the 1970s.
Stefanie, who took maths, chemistry and physics, is to study maths at Cardiff University.
The maths in question is called the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method.
ECONOMIST: The evolution of language: Babel or babble? | The
It argues that using performance measures, such as Ofsted inspections and comparing schools' value-added results in English and maths, there is "no correlation at all between spending and outcomes".
With only about 60% of 16-year-olds currently achieving the government's benchmark of five good GCSE passes including English and maths, it is clear many young people might not have passed the EBCs, which were being presented as more demanding than the current exams.
The university-level maths that actuaries need is crammed into two terms of the first year.
The new booklets - one written for primary schools and one for secondaries - are designed to help improve pupils' understanding of maths and how it is applied in everyday life.
But the 21-year-old is also studying maths and will sit his final exams at Cardiff University next year.
On the curriculum is English, maths, history, geography, combined sciences and French with the option of taking International GCSEs.
The government in England is overhauling the maths curriculum for primary schools.
Alongside sciences, the English Baccalaureate comprises English, maths and humanities - which is a choice of history or geography - and a language.
Anyone who says differently does not understand our explicit international commitments under the Copenhagen Accord, the Cancun Agreements - or, alternatively, is bad at maths.
Next year in a few hundred pilot schools, single level tests will replace Sats in maths, though the government is moving cautiously in introducing the new tests.
The maths department at the University of Warwick, one of the top-ranked in the country, is thinking of requiring further maths again, for the first time in more than a decade.
English is always the area where there is most dispute about grades because with maths and science - the other two subjects tested in Sats this summer - there is usually a right and wrong answer.
And if you do the maths behind the figures, this is hardly surprising.
应用推荐