Dusk in Cambridge. The exams are over, champagne is chilling and the mathematicians have come out to play.

A couple of hundred men and a dozen women mill around the medieval grounds of Trinity College. Some are discussing n-dimensional space, some the topology of teacups. But most just have a few drinks or play Frisbee on the lawn. It is the annual mathematicians' garden party.

“They choose Frisbee,” Peter Fremlin explains, like a TV anthropologist observing an Amazonian tribe, “because it requires little sporting ability, and the way it flies involves interesting physics.”

Fremlin is an interloper. He used to study maths but changed to English (“I was in a lecture, there was an equation that went across four blackboards and I thought ‘maybe I'm in the wrong place'”). But his former colleagues are no more skilled at “sexing up” their subject. Tim Dey, an undergraduate, admits that it carries a stigma: “People picture a beardy, bespectacled, socially inept guy.” He pauses and looks around. “And, to be fair, at Cambridge those attributes don't exactly go against you.”

If there is anywhere that a mathematician should feel comfortable, it is Trinity College. Since subject-based league tables began, Cambridge has been top for maths. And in each of those years, Trinity has taken in more mathematicians than any other Cambridge college. This year 46 new undergraduates arrived, almost 20 per cent of the intake for the university as a whole.

Their prospects are good. With one of the most sought-after degrees in the world, most will go on to earn fortunes in the City. Others will be wooed by technology companies. As one professor says: “Maths makes things like Google work. The internet would not be possible without some fairly hardcore maths that was only done about 20 years ago.”

Those who stay in academia can aspire to emulate the college's four Fields Medallists (the mathematical equivalent of Nobel laureates), one of whom is at the garden party. Arguably the college's greatest alumnus is Sir Isaac Newton, one of history's greatest mathematicians.

And yet. Even here there is the self- deprecation, the embarrassed air of

I-may-do-maths-but-let-me-prove-that-I'm-normal. When the Times photographer asked someone to act naturally and chat to his friend, he replied: “Ah, that's where you're wrong - chatting isn't natural for a mathematician.”

Describing his wooing technique, Ed Smith, a second year, said: “The best thing is to lie. I pretend to do archaeology and anthropology.”

Tim Dey has similar tactics. “The first couple of weeks, I told girls I did dance studies at Anglia Polytechnic,” he says. “That generally got a better response than saying I did maths at Cambridge - until they saw my moves, of course. In a way, though, saying that you do maths lowers their expectations, so it's good.

“The thing is, most people can't relate to a maths subject. Everyone reads and looks at a painting every now and then. But maths is just not interesting in the same way, so we can't talk about it.”

This attitude of society against the mathematician is something that last week's report on the state of British maths is trying to change. It laments a situation where it is socially acceptable to profess ignorance of maths, where it would not be of English. In a section entitled “From geek to chic”, the authors call for a change in the perception of maths; for the subject to move “from Cinderella to Queen of the Sciences”. In short, they want maths to be cool.

Ben Green, a professor in pure mathematics, agrees. “Something is very wrong. Everyone should be basically mathematically literate. People say to me ‘oh, I was never very good at maths'. It shouldn't be possible to say that - it should be akin to saying ‘I'm stupid' or ‘I've never been good at words'.

As strawberries and cream are distributed, Saul Glasman eulogises about his subject. “There's a tonne of abstract beauty to be appreciated,” he says. “It's the emergent complexity - the deeper you go, the more questions there are to ask.” To his left, one of his friends splutters over her wine. After a week of exams, some have had more than enough emergent complexity. But he ignores her. “And you reveal a structure. Some of it you feel you've made with your own hands, some of it you feel was there all along.”

Why, then, is this not appreciated in society at large? “Look around you,” Glasman's friend Jack Shotton says as he flops down on the grass. “We're not cool people.” Before starting as an undergraduate, Shotton represented Britain at the International Mathematics Olympiad. “The thing I like about maths is that you sit down, do a question, and four or five hours later you come out of it - you understand more and ... and you know what you did is right as well.”

Perhaps, in asking if maths is cool, we are posing the wrong question. Coolness is ephemeral and implies trying too hard. In short, it is a bit too humanities. “I'd love to say that I think it's cool, but it's really not,” says Doug Shaw, a cosmology researcher. “It's otherworldly but also ‘solid' - it's something that just ‘is'. It doesn't matter if it's cool.”

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