Small print

A round-up of today's other stories in brief

Nose to the e-grindstone

HIGHER MATHS. No two words in the English dictionary can terrify and daunt quite like "higher maths".

But help is at hand: grinds covering the entire Leaving Cert honours maths syllabus (to be tested in the paper later this week) are now free online – courtesy of Engineering Ireland.

“It started last year during Engineers Week when we were compiling a list of recommendations,” says Engineering Ireland’s Barry Stokes. “We decided we needed to be doing more. How do we get underprivileged kids involved in honours maths? Free grinds were an obvious way to go.”

Last year, a pilot scheme crammed the entire syllabus into eight free intensive lectures at Engineering Ireland’s Dublin headquarters. The classes were webcast simultaneously for those living elsewhere and were an immediate hit.

“It was a great success,” says Stokes. “We didn’t advertise it; it was all word of mouth. But it became clear that the best thing we could do for everybody was to make these grinds permanently available on the site.”

So educator and engineer Tim Joyce has been working his way through differential equations and complex numbers for months. Each lecture walks the viewer through past papers and the most intimidating algebraic formations. Next year, the same team will put together e-grinds covering the Junior Cert Maths course.

Mathematical excellence, they insist, is far more important than the points race.

“The more people who can get a pass or honours in Leaving Cert maths, the more confident people there’ll be,” says Joyce. “Education is for the betterment of the being. If you do maths, you’re training to use your mind clearly. It’s something that will always stand to you.”

Unsurprisingly, the e-grinds have attracted a good deal of online traffic in recent weeks. Is it possible for anyone do honours maths?

“My honest opinion is yes,” says Joyce. “The A parts on each question are worth 20 per cent; they’re very doable and they’ll get you half way to a pass. Part Bs are generally split in two, and at least half of that is very doable. If you’re careful you should be on for a pass with just those parts and heading toward an honour.”

Inspired by my visit, I did some sums. If there’s a complete syllabus taught online in 30 sections and four days to go until the first paper, the odds could be a whole lot worse.

See steps.ie/maths/videos.aspx for Engineering Ireland’s free e-grinds

TARA BRADY

She may be Gaga . . . but she's not the first

POPSTAR Lady Gaga is one of the most powerful people in the music industry, and although she wears her influences on her avant-garde sleeve, she claims to be a true original. But a new online paper trail is digging up the original Lady Gagas, and one of them is a 19th century Kildare woman.

Madame de Gaga was born Matilda Fitzgerald and became Lady Gaga in 1817 when she married a Frenchman, General the Chevalier Victor de Marion Gaga of Languedoc.

Madame de Gaga was the daughter of Sophia Charlotte Fielding and Lord Robert Stephen Fitzgerald, a British diplomat in Switzerland for three years in the 1790s, and one of 19 children of James Fitzgerald, the 20th Earl of Kildare and Emily Fitzgerald.

Her uncle was Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the Irish revolutionary who was killed in the 1798 rebellion.

Born in 1793, Madame de Gaga died in 1850, 25 years before her husband, with whom she had one child, Emily Matilda Sophia de Gaga.

The original Irish Lady Gaga emerged in recently rediscovered legal documents in an 1839 court case titled “De Gaga V The Duke Of Leinster” regarding the French interpretation of a dowry and the duty of trustees “in regard to the disposal of the wife’s fortune, where an Englishwoman marries a Frenchman, and it was declared that the marriage took place under the Law of Dowry as established by the French code”.

The court case appears to have sought to work out whether Madame de Gaga’s husband could access her dowry in order to acquire a house on Rue d’Anjou in Paris.

Renewed interest in the Irish Madame de Gaga puts paid to claims that Lady Gaga (real name Stephanie Germanotta) has “always been Gaga”.

While the Kildare woman mightn’t have had the hit songs, she got to the name more than 200 years before the New Yorker was even on the scene.

UNA MULLALLY

Love in a Cole-d climate

MARTIN SCORSESE is in line to direct a new film that will document the epic on/off relationship between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. It’s about time this intense romance burned up our cinema screens, but what other real-life love stories would make for good movies, Scorsese or no Scorsese?

Cole-d Mountain

The never-ending saga between one misbehaving footballer (Ashley Cole) and one sweetheart popstar (Cheryl Cole).  Will this love in a Cole-d climate (Newcastle) have a happy ending? May need subtitles for American audiences.

Jedward et Brit

In an updated version of Francois Truffaut’s adaptation of the Henri- Pierre Roché novel, Jedward travel across America to meet their hero and love of their lives, Britney Spears, but end up finding themselves. Coming of age/road movie/slasher flick.

When Trappy Met Stevie

A bromance gone wrong, depicting the fractious relationship between Giovanni Trapattoni and Stephen Ireland starring Betty White as both grandmothers. Pineapple Expressmeets Breakfast At Tiffany's.

Casabrangelina

Casablancameets Gone With The Wind: The frighteningly beautiful power couple (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie), the lowly housemaid (Jennifer Aniston) and a love triangle that is keeping the tabloid magazine industry in business even though, frankly, we don't give a damn.

UNA MULLALLY