There’s been a mild amount of fuss this last week about a beauty contest for academic girls – Miss University of London.

I’m not going to wade in talking about the death of feminism, or the fact that despite having the most valuable thing of all – education – these girls have chosen to fall back on a contest that essentially relies upon luck. It’s not my place to comment. Nor will I pick holes in the logic of the organisers who call it a ‘refreshing and unprecedented event’…

What I am going to suggest is that perhaps the judges of this event should also be academics. Rather than assessing beauty and ‘personality’, they could have biologists assess cultures of their bacterial flora, or mathematicians compute their curves and lines.

Indeed, why stop at this. There is such a hunger in the media for commentators in general that I think everything should have a mathematician attached to it to provide their opinion. Sports matches, singing contests and reality television shows.

‘Day 32 in the Big Brother House and Sean is stirring his tea in a manner that relates to Pi…’

‘Well, your singing was particularly effective, but your arm movements whilst dancing varied from parallel with a standard deviation of …’

If there is one defining mathematical characteristic of humans, it’s that they are terrible at estimating probability, just awful at it.

I include myself in that statement, I’m terrible at games of chance… I regularly lose my quarterly poker stake (£3) because of some terrible maths going on inside my head.

There’s a classic textbook exercise that asks – There are 30 people in a room, what are the chances of two of them sharing a birthday? I’ll let you think about that…

I also heard that you have a greater chance of being killed by a refrigerator than you have of winning the lottery jackpot… 1 in 13,983,816. Judging by the number of people you see queuing up to buy a lottery ticket you would think that refrigerators would be banned by now.

Even my old maths teacher made a fundamental mistake when he said that he was tempted to take a bomb onto a plane since the probability of there being two independent bombs on the same plane were quite small… actually, I think it was a bluff. He also used to host a Christmas poker game and would regularly fleece the students.

So I’m poor at calculating chance, and I had a teacher who stood to profit from the ignorance of his students… what is the probability that he deliberately mislead us in order to supplement his salary?