According to an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement by Ken Smith, Professor of Criminology at Bucks New University, university lecturers should stop correcting the most common mathematical errors in students' work and simply accept them as "variant" answers.

"Why shouldn't 57 be a prime number?" he asks. "It looks like one, and a lot of my students think that it is. Surely that gives it as good a claim to be prime as any other number?"

Other proposals to "simplify" mathematics in his article include making zero divided by zero equal to one, truncating pi to four decimal places -- 3.1415 -- since that's all anyone can remember, accepting "proof by example" as mathematically valid, and allowing students to "cancel the d" in calculus questions.

"I've seen mathematics teachers repeatedly correcting the same error in the same student's work, and yet the problem would be solved if they simply accepted the 10 commonest errors as correct.

"Mathematics teachers are just too uptight about the subject to allow any change. Would it hurt them so much if 0.9 recurring was strictly less than one? That would seem pretty sensible to me."