- cross-posted to:
- teaching
- cross-posted to:
- teaching
Will I ever need math? A mathematician explains how math is everywhere – from soap bubbles to Pixar movies::Math is more than memorizing times tables and doing homework problems. It is woven into more aspects of your life than you might think.
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So: not unless you’re a math professor, can’t google a percentages calculator, can’t make simple sums of a materials list, or, for some reason, want to calculate the maths underlying your creative/rendering applications. Not the most convincing article tbh.
It goes much more into details than that. Math comes very fast into play (and yes, simple sums is math and many people struggle even for that unfortunately) and if you want to avoid it, you have to trust other people to do it for you. And that comes with a small or very high price, depending on how well you are able to judge them.
For example, if you want to build a fence around your house, paint your walls a new color or with a design, or sew yourself a new outfit or quilt, all of those activities require knowledge about measurement and scaling. More complicated construction projects, such as building a treehouse, require lots of mathematical problem-solving skills.
Once you’ve laid out the plans for one of these projects, you need to buy all the materials. Percentages – which are special kinds of fractions – are especially important to understand when managing money. Understanding percentages can help you budget your money and increase your net worth.
Beyond budgeting, you might find yourself using percentages when cooking a double batch of brownies, determining how much medicine to take when you’re sick or understanding the weather forecast.
Can’t remember the exact quote but it was something to the tune of “you don’t have to know how a toilet works to crap in one but it might help you appreciate it more”. I feel its applicable here.
Sure but that is the case with literally everything. There’s depths to everything. No such thing as unskilled labor. But that doesn’t mean that you’ll “need” to know math. The fact that math can describe and underlies everything (the shape of bubbles! Wow! You don’t say!) feels like a patently obvious statement. The article doesn’t make a convincing argument (imo) that you will need to know it.
With the modern tools available to us it’s more important to learn how to use math than to be able to do the actual math.
The most important thing about learning math is the learning. It’s kind of like reading. Will you ever use reading in your life? Not always. But will it make you a more well rounded, interesting person? Probably.
Don’t get me wrong, there are countless applications of math that our society relies on for peace prosperity and health, but that shouldn’t be the motivation to learning math. That should be a government’s incentive to investing in good math education.
Being good at math means you are a good problem solver, have grit, and know how to work hard at something. It also means you’re probably not afraid of memorizing a few things, which is actually a good thing. As a math teacher (and someone with 10 years of math education myself) I have not yet met anybody who is good at math and didn’t have to work very hard at it. There is no faking being good at math.
