Seeming useless math can be applied if you look for opportunities.
When I attended military training for sergeant rank, there was a land navigation part. Plot the grid coordinates on a map, use a protractor to figure out the angles, which you then aim the compass towards and count paces to find the points out in the woods. I realized these made triangles and said fuck a protractor. I used trigonometry instead. Figured out the lengths of the sides of the triangles from the grid coordinates, then used those lengths and tangent to figure out the compass angle and distance. The instructors had no clue what I was doing. Took first place in that course because the other person I was tied with only found 3 out of 4 points in his two tries at landnav.
The best math skill for everyday life has to be dimensional analysis, though. Want to figure out how expensive it is to drive per hour? Well, you’ve got miles/hour, dollars/gallon, and miles/gallon. This can get you to dollars/hour by just canceling out the units. (I don’t have a paper to write things down but I think this is correct)
dollars/gallon X gallons/mile X miles/hour = dollars/hour
You can use dimensional analysis to convert all sorts of things. It’s awesome.
Yeah I know it’s the shitpost community but math is pretty cool.
Tangentially related, you can also combine a basic knowledge of math with a basic knowledge of spreadsheets to make people think you’re the second coming of Einstein
I shat this out in 5 minutes. All the white cells are user editable, and the blue cell calculates automatically. I could make it estimate annual gas costs by letting you adjust monthly mileage instead of speed and tweaking the math a bit. The average person would sooner close the application than try and make an interactive spreadsheet
Edit: I made the annual price one. You can either use monthly mileage for a good estimate, or distance to work for a very rough estimate (it multiplies the distance by 2x260 (2 to account for round trip, 260 because there are 52 weeks in a year and every week has 5 work days))
Of course it doesn’t account for non-work driving, but it also doesn’t account for holidays, so maybe it evens out
For my turbonerds out there, I’m not sharing the sheet itself because my name is on it, but here’s the behind-the-scenes
I teach college chemistry, and half the time it’s to STEM majors that see the obvious applications, but the other half the time, my students are going into nursing or other “STEM-adjacent” fields and I try and try to get them to see that the applications are there, if they just look, but many of them never do.
“Another day has passed and I still haven’t used the notion that the height of something on a slope is equal to the horizontal distance from the start of the slope times the steepness of the slope plus the initial height of the slope off the ground.” I swear people treat math as something you explicitly need to sit down and write the equations for to get any use out of instead of just, like, them being useful to make you a more logical, well-rounded thinker. It’s like thinking the sole point of reading Of Mice and Men in 8th grade is so that you can randomly recite quotes from it years later.
that’s how it’s taught. learning to reason about problems is secondary to “just do the numbers”. you’re not graded on understanding.
I guess that greatly depends on your teacher. However, I will say that “doing the numbers” and understanding are pretty strongly correlated in math. BTW the same goes for English literature where reading more books greatly increases your understanding.
it’s a different kind of understanding though. also, vocabulary in school is always presented in context, while mathematics usually isn’t, save for contrived examples, because you can’t gradually introduce stuff the same as with language.
like, i never got an intuition for division. i have to brute-force it every time. during school i would ask for help and nobody else seemed to get it either.
Edit:
what i wanted to say wasn’t entirely clear, so let’s try again:
doing the numbers is only useful when you are working towards understanding. at least when i was in school, after an intro to multiplication, the table for e.g. 7 was presented “without comment”: we were to fill it in while timed, and if we did it quickly enough we were considered to have “learned” it, and got to advance to 8.
I went to a private high school in the US and graduated in 06, just to set the scene.
Animal Farm was on the reading list sophomore year, and you were tested on it strictly on the plot. What happened. Who did what. That’s it.
The class as a whole learned more about cheating than anything, because the teacher used the same tests for his whole career. They were typed on a typwriter, you just wrote your answers on your own paper and turned them both in. He was a good basketball coach from what I understand though, so… yeah.
I don’t remember very much of “Of Mice and Men”, and I don’t remember very much of the math I learned in school either. I’m not mad about having learned/read that stuff, but I also don’t feel bad about not remembering/using it since.
Learning it in your formative years likely improved your analytical thinking skills in general
I constantly use algebra/calc and graph data for my stem job. Everyone should have a similar base of knowledge. I don’t complain that I learned about the Mongolian empire or read Of Mice and Men.
Unfortunately, the people thinking they don’t need to know stuff are also the people “doing their own research” on vaccines and such.
Learning stuff doesn’t just impart knowledge, it rounds out your understanding of what you don’t know and where you should yield to expertice which is arguably equally as important as knowing stuff.
I used the Pythagorean theorem and trigonometry to score an ~800 m headshot in Arma 3. It was a lot of grid spaces away. Pythagorean theorem to get the hypotenuse, then trig to get the vertical offset.
Felt like a math sniper badass when I hit the shot the first time.
I use it regularly
:•(
