I was surprised to read that Mark Flinn’s letter (12 March) was dismissive of Fibonacci sequences. I find the basic sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8… very useful when driving abroad. I convert a distance in kilometres to miles by moving back one place in the sequence, eg 8km becomes 5 miles. For more complex conversions like 11km, use the 3 and the 8 and then add their predecessors 2 and 5 to get 7 miles. These conversions are surprisingly accurate.
John Hackney
Stockport
• Like Jill Wallis (Letters, 16 March), I sat separate Scottish “O-grade” papers (in 1980) in maths and arithmetic, and a third one in statistics. Useful training for citizen-sceptics of government deployment of same?
Heather Green
Aberdeen
• In Dover it is common (though possibly apocryphal) knowledge, that the family of the late Ian Mikardo MP, arriving at Dover as Jewish refugees from the tsarist empire, and wishing to chose a surname to “fit in”, chose the surname Mikardo from a poster from the well-known Gilbert and Sullivan production playing locally, transcribing the spelling incorrectly due to problems reading non Cyrillic script (Letters, 17 March).
Bob Frost
Deal, Kent
• If immigrants take their names from where they settle, I hope not too many end up in Pratts Bottom in Kent.
Michael Cunningham
Wolverhampton
• Can we just identify ourselves as the fourth and fifth readers of the Guardian in Romford (Letters, 17 March)? Thanks to Martin’s newsagents, in Clockhouse Lane, it lands on our mat each morning at 7am.
Jill and Geoff Grote
Romford
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
