
When will I ever use math? - mrspeaker
http://dimsumthinking.com/2012/04/10/when-will-i-ever-use-this/
======
edw519
Asking "When will I ever use math?" is like jogging and asking, "When will I
ever use these calf muscles?"

(The answer to both is "all the time", but that's not the point.)

I was a math major who did independent research in Elementary Number Theory
and decided to switch paths and become a computer programmer (many years ago).
It's true, I haven't encountered many sigmas, deltas, and derivative signs in
all those years, but there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that I'm
exercising the same mental muscles built with math.

OP mentions “wondering, playing, amusing yourself with your imagination.”
Hell, build something.

Assembling ones and zeros to help real people solve real problems is every bit
as wonderful, playful, and amusing as anything I ever did with pure
mathematics. And probably even more rewarding...I've discovered that it's much
more likely to see a customer do a happy dance with software that never
existed before I built it than proving Fermat's Last Theorem or figuring out
what Galois was up to on that long last night.

~~~
timwiseman
Very well said. Though it is worth noting the distinctions between different
types of math.

I found my studies of theoretical math in college enormous fruitful just as I
found jogging beneficial. But I thought doing numerous arithmetic problems in
middle school to be of minimal value and the rote memorization of things like
multiplication tables to be worthless.

In short, much like exercise, studying math should be done in a way that is
pushing your personal limits at least a little.

~~~
shasta
You don't use multiplication in your life?

~~~
grogs
You don't need to memorise your times tables to do multiplication.

I seem to have learnt checkpoints within the times tables; e.g. when asked 7
_6, I do 7_ 5+7. I know 10 and 5 times tables instantly, and adding 7 is
trivial, so I clearly never bothered to actually learn the 6 times table.

Rote learning is generally inferior. Give a man a fish versus teach how to
fish.

~~~
Foy
I thought I was weird for always breaking apart multiplication problems in my
head like that.

Good to know I'm not alone.

Same with addition, 1324 + 1872 is just 2000 + 324 + 872 which is just 3100 +
24 + 74 which is 3196.

Math is about creativity, somewhat ironically. ;)

~~~
DanBC
> _I thought I was weird for always breaking apart multiplication problems in
> my head like that._

It's a technique taught in schools now.

(<http://www.mad4maths.com/math_help_multiplication/>)

See also "Chunking" for division.

(<http://www.mad4maths.com/math_help_division/>)

~~~
Foy
Oh cool! I got taught to line up the number in columns, carry the one, etc...
really a painful way to do addition. :(

------
gxs
Football players don't lift weights on the field - yet they lift weights to
gain strength and conditioning to prepare for what occurs on the field.

I was a math major in college. I don't use the actual math I learned, but 4
years of solving really hard math problems at Cal honed my problem solving
skills and helped me develop a type of stamina to try my hand at them for long
periods of time.

My grades weren't the best, and having math Olympiads in your classes
sometimes makes things harder than they should be. That said, I treasure the
experience. I learned to push myself in a way I hadn't before. I learned the
value of being rigorous, and even the value of getting creative to solve
problems. I learned that even after 4 hours of staring at a problem, I should
keep at it because I may get that ah-ha moment at the fifth or sixth hour.

So do I use math everyday? Not really. Do I use the ability to solve problems,
to abstract my knowledge in one area and apply it another, to carry through
long logical thoughts everyday? You bet your ass I do.

------
wheels
This is passionate, noble and wrong. Or at least a false-dichotomy.

This is a defense of pure mathematics. Pure mathematics can certainly be a
thing of beauty and that elegance is the draw which pulls in most
mathematicians.

But applied mathematics are also a powerful tool. One needn't love the
elegance of pure mathematics to appreciate the utility of applied mathematics.

I mostly like applied mathematics, though I appreciate pure mathematics. I
like physics and applied computer science. Exploration into them wouldn't be
possible were it not for advanced mathematics, but I usually only learn new
mathematical concepts when it's demanded by the application that I'm studying.
That's not the "wrong" way to appreciate mathematics and the implication is
that I've almost always already answered, "Where am I ever going to use this?"
before I learn add new mathematics to my toolkit.

~~~
demian
Almost every problem that involves material resources and time can be modeled
and solved using math. The strech people go around to _avoid_ using applied
mathematics, either by choice or ignorance, is astonishing.

~~~
jacquesm
One part of this is that computers are now so fast that you can get the answer
to fairly complicated questions for large amounts of data without getting
anywhere close to the optimal analytical solution.

The need to optimize and the associated knowledge is not quite as much of a
problem as it was in the recent past.

This leads to a hidden form of bloat, programs written in a terribly
inefficient way that still perform adequately in isolation but that fail to
compose in a useful way because that quickly slows things down to the point
where it no longer produces an answer in acceptable time.

That probably falls under ignorance in your enumeration but it may be a sub-
category labelled 'appears unnecessary'.

There ought to be a an energy label for algorithms :)

~~~
rcfox
> There ought to be a an energy label for algorithms

Isn't that what we use asymptotic analysis for?

~~~
jacquesm
You missed the ':)' ;)

------
m_for_monkey
_The band kids and the football kids never ask their teachers and coaches,
“when will I ever use this”._

Because they are _playing_ the flute and they are _playing_ football. They
enjoy it _now_ and that's what counts, they don't even think about the future.

 _And yet they come into my math class and raise their hand half-way through
my demonstration of the mean value theorem to ask me when they will ever use
this._

Because the "mean value theorem" sounds like boring shit and their only hope
is that it _may_ be useful in the future.

If you teach them programming to solve their physics homework and make it a
game using math, they won't ask.

Never.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> If you teach them programming to solve their physics homework and make it a
> game using math, they won't ask.

True. That's actually how I ended up as a programmer - math in school was
boring, trying to make a video game was not. I finally learned trigonometry
only when I was trying to figure out how to rotate an object in 2D space for
my game. Also, there was a point in time when I used a "formula for
distance/vector length in 2D space", but I had absolutely no idea what that
"Pythagoras' theorem" is useful for.

~~~
cellis
Game programming will more quickly take you down the math rabbit hole than
than any other kind of programming. It is always painfully clear that you
_should_ know better math when you run into a simple problem like "find a
solution to hit this moving target", or something more complex like "figure
out how the inverse kinematics of animal's bones work".

For the first problem you could use anything from tight to algebra to calculus
to solve it. For the second, you might easily find yourself knee deep in a PDF
giving you a "remedial treatment of jacobian matrices"

------
kalid
A huge problem with math is we end up teaching mathematical vocabulary, not
mathematical fluency. It's like high-school language classes: everyone
memorizes vocab lists, stutters out canned phrases, and forgets it all later.
I'd prefer to speak fluently with a 3-year old's vocabulary than artificially
with a high-schooler's.

Similarly, I'd prefer students leave high school fluent in basic algebra, vs.
trying to force-march people through algebra 2, trig, calculus, etc. when it's
clear they'll just hate the subject afterwards. (Some students will read
ahead, great. The others, since they actually enjoyed math, will pick up the
other stuff later).

Asking "When will I use this?" reveals that we don't understand a major goal
of math education: fluency with powerful mental models, not just factoids you
can directly apply.

~~~
learc83
Exactly. In my experience tutoring 3 younger siblings, the problems they've
had with trig and calculus are caused by a lack of mastery of basic algebra.

I think everyone would be much better off if they left high school with a
mastery of basic algebra and left trig and calculus for College (for most
kids).

------
msluyter
The analogy between band and math is problematic. Band has various payoffs
that math doesn't: getting attention from peers, the inherent joy in playing
music, peer bonding via football games, band trips and whatnot. (Not that math
doesn't have "inherent joy" -- it just seems more solitary, more cerebral, and
less socially glorified than music.)

There's no doubt that our math education destroys curiousity, and if we could
teach math in a non-utilitarian way, as a sort of artistic endeavor, that
would be amazing, but... is it even possible? Has it ever been tried? Whenever
I think about this, I think about season 4 of The Wire.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Music can be exactly as solitary and cerebral as math. That aspect of music
doesn't get the same press, is all. If you play three chords on a tall stage
people know you're in a band; if you sit in your home working out a Bach fugue
nobody needs to know.

I have a slightly silly book about birdwatching. It has a section which talks
about birding competitions - "Big Days", they call them - and the final two
sentences stick in my head, always:

 _Don't go away from this thinking that birding is an endless succession of
fabbydoo games or fun, fun, fun without a moment's rest. Quite the opposite.
Birding is mostly about looking at birds. It is no use to pretend otherwise._

A useful motto.

Birding is very popular, of course, even in the go-go all-action United
States. Other popular activities include knitting, gardening, hiking, sudoku,
crosswords, reading, fantasy football, Angry Birds, writing comments on
message boards, and, ahem, hacking. All of them solitary, cerebral, and
socially unglorified. (Though I guess fantasy football is arguable: You can
probably spend an entire evening over beer talking with your friends about the
performance of their fantasy football teams. For all I know it's even popular
in high school. I knew several people in high school who were reliable
authorities on every active major-league baseball player...)

People have a warped view of other people's lives in general, and particularly
the lives of high school students. I suspect that high school kids enjoy
quiet, solitary activities as much as anyone else: In other words, more than
you notice. The quiet hobbies are just unobtrusive, so they don't get a lot of
press and they don't show up in movies or TV except around the edges.

Speaking for myself, I think I stayed _away_ from band in school because it
was full of people and attention. I gravitated _toward_ the quiet sources of
pleasure and meaning. Of course, I was blessed with a math club mentor who
knew what "recreational mathematics" was...

~~~
nickpinkston
I think matrix math could actually be presented in a Sudoku-like format - for
a Gaussian Elimination or some such - and that'd actually be fun for the
Sudoku crowd to play. It's really pretty similar skills involved. Sudoku is
probably just a special case matrix problem...

------
stiff
Just save your time and read V. I. Arnolds "On teaching mathematics" instead:

<http://pauli.uni-muenster.de/~munsteg/arnold.html>

He said everything I could possibly want to say as a reply here but probably
better then I ever will be able to put it:

 _It is only possible to understand the commutativity of multiplication by
counting and re-counting soldiers by ranks and files or by calculating the
area of a rectangle in the two ways. Any attempt to do without this
interference by physics and reality into mathematics is sectarianism and
isolationism which destroy the image of mathematics as a useful human activity
in the eyes of all sensible people._

------
flom
The problem with the analogy between music and math is the free-will aspect.
Everyone is FORCED to take math, whereas most people are NOT forced to play an
instrument (at least in the US). Everyone knew a couple of math wizzes who
usually were not the one's asking "why do I need to learn this?" These kids
would probably do math even if they weren't forced to, and indeed, many of
them go on to pursue a higher education in mathematics, completely
voluntarily. On the other hand, many kids whose parents force them to play an
instrument often complain and ask "why do I need to play an instrument?"

tl;dr: If you force someone to do something, and you don't want to make them
resent the thing you're forcing them to do, you should explain to them why
you're forcing them to do it, i.e., why it's in their best interest, whether
it's math, music, learning a language, etc.

------
orbitingpluto
When someone sent me the '5Fri, 5Sat, 5Sun only every 823 years' email I sent
a quick refutation and explained that there are just a couple variations of
the calendar. It went something like this:

The first day of the year has 7 seven choices. It's either a leap year or it
isn't. Also 823 is a prime number. Can you now figure out why this isn't true?
(You can also prove it by looking at the calendar when you double click on the
time in Windows.)

The person did not want to be enlightened and I was deemed a buzzkill.

The lesson I learned is to be careful when educating someone when it may take
away that person's 'awe and wonder'. That is why atheists should avoid trying
to reason away the faith of the religious.

~~~
zasz
It isn't about "not wanting to be enlightened." That person wanted to share a
fun fact--they were trying to be social. And you shot them down and
essentially called them stupid.

~~~
orbitingpluto
"Essentially called them stupid?" I shared some "fun-facts" back and offered
them a chance to figure it out. That's social. If the email was fire-and-
forget, that's not social.

If we are all predisposed to take unconsidered facts as an insult to our
intelligence and not as a prelude to a discussion, then that is a whole other
educational issue.

Also please accept my apologies if you think the word enlighten confers a
condescending tone. I was going for 'greater knowledge/understanding'.

~~~
waqf
I guess they would have preferred if you'd forwarded some fun facts which
didn't contradict theirs.

Something like "91 is the only prime number that isn't blue", perhaps.

------
ef4
If you didn't take the author's advice and read [Lockhart's
Lament](<http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf>), go do it. It's worth
it.

~~~
draggnar
2nded... It is the most influential thing I have ever read. I used to hate
math in school and the perspective of math as art completely changed the way I
think about it.

------
WalterBright
I encounter many people who do not see the point in learning math. They're the
same people who get taken for a ride regularly when they finance a purchase,
deal with contractors, plan their investments, get rooked on their credit card
fees, etc. And they rarely realize what has happened to them.

It's expensive to not know math.

------
jgrahamc
One of the simplest uses of math was shown to me by a carpenter who made a
triangle from three pieces of wood with sides 24", 32" and 40". Because of
this his triangle had a right angle in the corner and he could use it to check
that things (such as large areas of tiling) were square.

Good old Pythagoras: 24^2 + 32^2 = 40^2.

Because the sides were long he had a nice big right angle to work with.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Yes, I remember my uncle showing me this when we were doing some roofing. He
then refused to believe me when I figured out a few other ratios that would
also do the same thing.

~~~
ajross
Amusing, but this is where engineering thought differs: obviously your
rediscovery of the 5:12:13 right triangle or whatever was precocious and
showed a deeper mastery of the subject.

That said: your advice sucked. The 3:4:5 triangle is a better choice for
obvious reasons (smaller numbers) and not so obvious ones (less sensitivity to
measurement error due to larger internal angles).

The critically important distinction there is precisely that between, say,
Haskell and Ruby. :)

~~~
madhadron
> The critically important distinction there is precisely that between, say,
> Haskell and Ruby. :)

Absolutely. Why bother with all that unnecessary complexity in Ruby?

~~~
ajross
I know that was sarcasm (as was my original post), but that's kind of my
point. Haskell _is_ a simpler language than Ruby in a lot of ways. But the
extra complexity in Ruby (or Perl, whatever -- pick your workaday language) is
driven by clear practical concerns.

Where a functional nut would sit and worry about getting a design right that
correctly abstracts the properties of any right triangle, a web developer is
happy to hard code the values for 3:4:5 because that's all that's required.
_And he isn't wrong to do so._

~~~
fpgeek
Perhaps, but he isn't necessarily right to do so either. If the requirements
for the triangle are uncertain enough or change often enough taking the time
to get the abstraction right can be appropriate engineering tradeoff.

------
Jarred
I suspect when students ask, "When will I use this?", they don't see any
practical or abstract uses of what the teacher is teaching. In other words, it
isn't expanding their mind or changing how they think about things. I've yet
to have a math teacher that does this well, but I've also yet to have a good
math teacher. Maybe there's a correlation.

~~~
georgieporgie
I keep mentioning that, in my opinion, non-college mathematics teachers
generally only know enough math to get through the end of the material they're
teaching in any given semester. I don't think they're capable of teaching the
material from multiple angles, which seems necessary in order to instill a
fundamental grasp of the material.

------
dmvaldman
This is a pretty easy question to answer, and calendar arithmetic is not how
you do it.

If you want to do something, you don't need much math. If you want to do it
WELL, you do.

The second you want to optimize something, you need math. Whether you're
figuring out the analytics of an A/B test (stats!), or finding the best inputs
for optimal outputs (set a derivative equal to 0 anyone?), or making an
algorithm more efficient by lowering its asymptotic complexity.

You can do stuff. Math just makes it better. Like salt on bland food.

Full disclosure: I'm defending my PhD in math in 2 months! My opinions may be
biased.

~~~
madhadron
> Whether you're figuring out the analytics of an A/B test (stats!)

Sorry, off topic, and not personally directed at you, but I'm getting so tired
of everyone pretending that A/B testing is something fancy as opposed to a
willful ignorance of the past hundred years of work in experimental design.
Will you all please go look up orthogonal arrays and linear models?

------
grn
I don't think that the comparison with music or sports is correct. If I had to
play an instrument I would ask for a motivation because I don't enjoy playing.
Similarly someone who doesn't enjoy maths asks for a reason to study it. When
you present maths to someone who doesn't like it on its own then the problem
is to find a balance between abstraction and applications. When maths is
presented too abstractly then it looks useless. When it's presented too
concretely then it looses its essence and may seem trivial.

------
drostie
I really like to put it this way: "Of the several professional mathematicians
I have known, only one of them could calculate a 15% tip in her head."

Now, mind you, all of them know that, in order to get the right overall tip,
every person can just calculate the tip on what they themselves ordered and
pay that -- and it will magically sum to the right value. They might also know
that if you had to tip self-consistently -- that is, if you also had to pay a
15% tip on your tip, and a 15% tip on your tip on your tip, and so on, that
this process converges and is essentially the same as just paying an effective
tip. (They might even be able to tell you that the effective tip is 15%/0.85,
if they're still reasonably young.)

Those are the sorts of things they're good at. I know some who will talk your
ears off about the convergence of an involution series in a noncommutative
algebra and the problems of just finding a nice notation which makes the
problem not look ugly, because the idea is really just so simple once you skip
past the messy derivation to the intuitive result.

Computing the actual tip? Not so much. Heck, that effective tip? That's
3/17ths, if you really churn the mental gears! Who has time to divide 3 by
17?! That's what I have a calculator for. Except, well, I didn't bring a
calculator because we never use them -- but that's what the computer in my
office is for.

~~~
vacri
I really don't understand your point. Calculating a 15% tip is monstrously
simple to do in your head. When I visited the US, I was able to do it from the
first meal onward, for meals solo or alone. Dropping the last digit and adding
half again is so brain-numbingly simple, though I must admit I did dine at one
stage with some native college students who _pulled out a calculator_ to
figure out their part of the tip.

It's not clear in what you're writing if you mean "when presented with a bill,
how much to tip" or "given the final payment, how much of it was tip", or
something else.

~~~
drostie
I mean "when presented with a bill, how much to tip." It's just not the sort
of thing which mathematicians are ever expected to do. There is no math
journal where you can publish the tips you calculated. It's not their job,
there are no theorems to be proven there, etc., etc.

(You're actually doing it a little more complicated than it has to be because
it sounds like you're spending a little memory remembering the number you took
10% of. Take half, add it to the original, which is presumably still right in
front of you, then drop the digit after.)

I learned a lot of mental calculation because my background is in applied
physics, where you're expected to reason about the size of things etc. (A good
example question might be, "how far do you think an air molecule can go before
it bumps into another air molecule?")

So, just for example, to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit you multiply by 2,
subtract 10%, and add 32. It is exact. So 25°C → 50 → 45 → 77°F. To convert
Fahrenheit to Celsius you subtract 32, divide by 2, add 10%, then add 1% if
you really feel like it; it is approximate. So 52°F → 20 → 10 → 11 → 11.11°C.
Those sorts of things I will do in my head when people give me a number in one
or the other temperature. Tipping is especially nice when compared to the fact
that in New York State there is an 8% sales tax which is not added to any of
the prices on stuff at the store -- calculate a tip and halve it.

[Naive reasonings on air: small upper bounds can be given by the fact that it
has to travel easily through the small passageways in your inner ear, but my
favorite calculation is to take (kinematic viscosity) / (speed of sound), both
of which are things that an applied physics geek should roughly know.]

------
podopie
I pushed this comment out to my peers for a read first, but thought I'd share
here as well. I've been in the author's shoes as both an English teacher and
band director (at the same time), and disagree wholeheartedly. As others
pointed out, he's comparing hard skills (math) and soft skills (gained from
anything, but in this particular case football and band).

No kid asks when band or football is going to be useful in their life because
they already have a premise around it: start from the bottom, and you have
four years to become a leader. Math doesn't provide this opportunity, because
the moment you get a passing grade in a math course, you move on to the next
class. There's no leadership here. No opportunity to lead that class you
passed with what you now know. Nothing shifts. On another note, you do gain
group work skills and peer bonding, like in other said activities.

The calendar thing pisses me off, like him, but for other reasons.

Primarily, this isn't because people don't know math. It's because they don't
want to do it. We're currently in an era where it's easier to share
information--good and bad--than for us to figure it out on our own. The
problem here isn't that no one knows math, it's that "share" and "be a sheep"
is much higher on everyone's bucket list than "do something by myself and
learn from it." This is especially with kids. Instead of frustration, however,
he's provided with a the perfect warmup problem. Ask kids to figure out if the
answer is true or not using what they know about math, five minutes pass, and
you show them how to handle it. You make two points now: math is useful, and
don't always believe everything that gets shared around the internet.

------
kappaknight
Using a thin font + small font + gray on white font = hard to read.

There's a better math joke in there somewhere...

------
ajratner
The grouping of theoretical, 'QED' style math with music and football is
interesting to think about. I think football and math go together and can be
seen as inverse processes wrt to music. Both football and theoretical math
have you start with arbitrary rules or principles and then build up a system,
add extrapolated layers of complexity on top of that. The top layers recreate
the world building up from that core set of assumptions.

Music on the other hand can be seen, at its most elegant, as taking the
complexity of the world and reducing it or rather tying it together,
coalescing it into patterns, rhythms, and other things that approach the
simplicity and fundamental nature of what one starts out with math, or at
least the earliest lemmas of a mathematical system.

I think both are intensely pleasurable activities in their own way because
they let you trace this path from fundamentals to complexity and back. Math
and football as challenges that have you climb up the mountain of complexity,
but that still remain close enough to the base to be simple and absolute and
beautiful in these ways; and music as an initially complex and tumultuous
thing that gets rid of just enough entropy to be simpler but not fake.

------
maratd
I'll leave external benefits stemming from mathematics for others to discuss.
When will you use the actual math you're learning? Never. Because you'll
forget all of it within short order and when you actually need to use it,
you'll be forced to re-learn it.

Re-learning it will be much easier though. Kind of like remembering how to
ride a bicycle.

Anyway, what are the times when you'll need math? When you're trying to solve
interesting problems. You will _never_ use math if you're doing routine
programming work. However, if you need to create an algorithm that detects
clients within a radius of 1 mile of your location, you'll need math. If you
need to rate those clients on a curved basis, you'll need math. Not skull-
fracturing math, but still math. Many, many other examples.

So if you're pulling data from a database and displaying it, no math. If
you're actually creating that data or heavily modifying it, math.

I don't think anything past calculus is necessary unless you're doing some
very specialized work, but up to that point is an absolute must for any
computer scientist.

------
khyryk
> This, to me, is mathematics. Playing, confirming, questioning — even in my
> real life. It gave me a much sadder answer for people when they ask me “when
> am I ever going to use this”.

This isn't exclusive to mathematics. I'm sure there are thousands of blog
posts lamenting the lack of philosophy, comparative literature, computer
science, etc. instruction.

------
Dn_Ab
As a fervent math addict whose enjoyment reaches into my choice of programming
language (functional) and who would be delighted to be gifted a text on
differential forms, I think this question deserves to be asked.

Math teaching is being carried along with a thousand year momentum and while
the current curriculum made sense when many jobs involved building catapults,
bridges, ships or cathedrals and jobs as a carpenter or mason were more
numerous, they make little sense now.

Notice also that most of these subjects were set at a time before education
was necessary so that if you went into say a gymnasium; odds were you wanted
to be a teacher, academic or engineer. So topics like trigonometry, geometry,
calculus and higher algebra (matrices, analytic geometry) made sense.

But these days, the vast majority of people do not need these subjects. On top
of that there is a great crime. The most pertinent topics to modern living are
given short thrift. Subjects like understanding basic statistics (including
mean, mode, median, stdev, and variance), probability (including expected
value), basic decision theory and estimation. All of these would have far more
use to every day life and could be fully taught in the context of how they
would help in real life (media, gamblers fallacy, money management etc).

Advanced topics would be things like distinguishing conditional and joint
probabilities, counting (combinatorics), graphs and networks, exponentiation
and logarithms, common plots (logistic, exponential, parabolic), rate of
change, and the relationship between a circle and triangle (must be taught
with animations). These things actually still have use to many people.

There is also the question of should math be taught at early years at all? A
12 year old can probably compress their previous 7 year math eduaction to 1.
Maybe just numbers, (Z,+) or (Z,*)? I don't know but I think the question of
if math education starts too early deserves to be looked at. The current
hatred is in part due to a cycle of teachers who hated the subject having to
force learn it in college and then having to teach it by force in addition to
other subjects they may be stronger in.

Instead let the child's curiosity guide them. So they would arrive not by
force and a bunch of unmotivated subjects but by curiosity. To augment the
lack of math classes there will be game classes to teach reasoning. Not just
video games but also card, dice and board games - with the caveat that the
game must be PSPACE complete. Just let the kids play and compete. Maybe they
will learn the same type of reasoning that will be useful to learning about
chains, posets, groups, first order logic or probability. The more determined
may even go read about the topics.

For video games the game must allow scripting. I think such a policy would
just about eliminate thoughts of the pointlessnsess of math.

Kids are not dumb, they will do impressive things if it interests them. Adults
make this mistake of underestimating kids all the time e.g. whenever they say
things like "whaoh that was done by a 12 year old?!"

------
jderick
I think that a lot of the math we learn in middle and high school is not that
useful. For example, when was the last time I used the quadratic equation, or
had to calculate a derivative using the chain rule, or had to do a geometric
proof of any kind.

Personally I think learning to program is far more useful than any of those
skills and yet it is usually presented as an 'elective' course in most
schools.

Not to say that I don't appreciate math, but if we look at cost vs benefit, I
think our current curriculum could be updated somewhat. Maybe some math
classes could be offered as 'electives'. Of course, there were other less
useful classes I was required to take as well.

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TeMPOraL
> when was the last time I used the quadratic equation

Actually, quadratic equation might be one of the most important things in high
school maths - lots of practical problems, especially involving optimization,
tend to be reduced to (or approximated by) quadratic equation.

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commieneko
I always tell my media technology students that everyone should learn to
sketch and learn to play a musical instrument. You don't really do this in
order to be able to draw something to hang in a gallery, or to perform in
front of others, though that may be a side benefit. You do this in order to
learn to see and to hear better. No doubt this is useful too, but the real
reason is to better appreciate and experience the world around you.

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krollew
Maths are sometimes useful for some people. It's matter of what part of maths
we are talking about. For example I used to use some geometry and
statistics/probability calculus. Of course I use algebra almost everyday. Rest
of maths may be great entertainment for now. :)

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gaoshan
When you have to help your kids with their homework :)

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Tycho
Yeah but maths isn't _fun._

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InclinedPlane
Math is quite fun, and exciting. But often it is taught in schools in a very
poor manner which destroys any of the fun aspects of it. Read, say,
Cryptonomicon or Diamond Age and tell me math isn't fun.

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jl6
This question should be answered with a challenge. " _You_ won't use math, but
your boss will."

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unexpected
It's only a little bit ironic that his calendar for July 2012 is wrong.

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tjr
I kept staring at the calendar trying to figure out if his point was that
people were so uninformed about mathematics that they don't know what day of
the month it is...

