Well, let's see. My degree's in accounting so it came in quite handy for that. Not to mention my work, which involves an awful lot of math.
I can actually balance my checkbook, budget my money, and figure out how badly my investments are doing right now.
I can figure out how to adjust recipes since I'm not cooking for 4-6 servings, including knowing whether my mini pie pan is actually 1/4 of a regular size pie pan. (I wonder just how many people do that one?)
It enabled me to make a spreadsheet to balance the calories & carbs of a diabetic cat I once had, not to mention figuring out how to convert all those's cc's and other weird things I'd never used.
It came in really handy to make me one of the few people to solve a puzzle in a game that I was helping to beta test. And when I played RAMA.
And it can also be just plain fun, considering that I like puzzles of all sorts.
I must first state that as I get older Mathematics is occupying a greater part of my
brain and how it functions.
Mind you I really like it.
I would go as far as to say that I am at last practicing what I have been preaching for a long time.
I used to deal with many younger students
when I used to teach, my suggestion to :-
" I HATE MATHS " was the direct opposite:-
"I LOVE MATHS". ( Repeat this loud in front of a mirror.)
What fascinates me is I really mean what I say.
Mathematics in all its forms is always at the
back of my mind.
One of the things I ponder frequently are PRIMES. Why are they so important?
Another area is THE PROPERTIES of numbers.
Number 11 really gets me going.
Every car number I see, I ask the question :-
is that number divisible exactly by 11.
Why not 7 or 13 but 11.
I would like to hear from different members
as to why is Maths so fascinating.
Beyond its day-to-day practical application in my biz, math is a key that lets me unlock various doors, behind which are a boatload of fascinating subjects. Following is just one particular example, but I could name dozens.
Plenty of years ago, I stumbled across an article that talked about the physics topics of relativity and time dilation. I read about the Twin Paradox. It can be painted different ways, but the version you'll see if you check out "Twin Paradox" on Wiki goes like this:
A spaceship is built with the capability of traveling at very high speeds. Just before it launches from Earth, twins are born. One of the twins is placed aboard the spaceship with the crew, and the other stays on Earth. The ship zips away, travels at 86.6% of the speed of light, and goes out 4.45 light years and back. On the day the ship returns, 10.28 years have passed on Earth since it left. But for the ship and its occupants, only 5.14 years have passed. So the stay-at-home twin is now 10.28 years old when he goes to greet his returning twin, but the twin stepping off the ship is only 5.14 years old. And they were born on the same day!
Well brother, I HAD to find out more about THIS stuff! I got my paws on Relatively Simply Explained, by Martin Gardner. Now, I'm no physicist by any stretch, and Gardner's little book fit the bill. It's aimed at giving lay-dummies like me a brief simplistic glimpse at the utterly mind-bending implications of relativity and space-time. (Oh yeah, in Gardner's book he gives a calculation from a nuclear physicist at UC Berkeley: An astronaut leaves Earth, travels to the Andromeda galaxy and back, and is able to travel at such a speed (unspecified) that he ages 55 years during his trip. Even though he's only 55 years older than when he left, Earth is 3 million years older! (By that time, he'll find that reality TV has finally run its course, and Sylvester Stallone has just come out with Rocky XXXVI)).
Although Gardner keeps the mathematics to a bare minimum, there's no avoiding that math has to come to the party just a bit. It doesn't require much, but without any math, all that totally cool stuff in his book would be largely inaccessible to a reader.
Maybe a better metaphor is that math is like a secret agent decoder ring. There's all kinds of fascinating stuff out there (finance, engineering, physics, how stuff works,.......), but it's like it's all written in a secret code--and a knowledge of math, to some level, is the decoder ring that allows you to understand what you're reading.
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