The importance of math
You’ve probably been in a math class where a student shouts, in despair, “I want to be a (designer, business person, plumber), why the hell do I need this anyways?”
Invariably, one of two things occurs:
(1) The teacher tries to convince you need this to do more math. Either you need it to pass the class, to pass the next class or to use it in yet another formula.
(2) The teacher tries to establish the real-world use of math, but usually fails miserably. Either the teacher talks about the importance of math in designing space shuttles or regulating the stock market or building bridges. The thing is, you know very well you’ll never use Taylor series in your career. In fact, very few will actually use the learnings, and most of those who do will have to relearn it entirely by the time it’s useful.
Math, in of itself, is useless. (at least at our level)
In the past century, we’ve been terrible at teaching math.
We’ve resorted to teaching math with paint-by-numbers classwork because it’s easy. If you don’t know the answer, there’s a formula you can blindly apply. And if you can’t find the formula, raise your hand and the teacher will neatly write it on the board so you can learn it by heart for the next time it’ll show up on the exam. Neither the teacher nor the students have to understand, just follow what’s in the textbook and you’ll get the answer.
Yes, you’ll get the answer.
But it turns out the end result is useless. Computers are much faster, better and cheaper to spew out the solution of any problem.
Your insight into the math problems, however, is incredibly worthwhile. Thats we’re you, as a human being, come in to play.
Math is like a brain workout. See, you don’t workout for fear of someone throwing you a dumbbell when waking in the street. Similarly, you don’t learn math because you expect to apply calculus in your everyday life.
Math trains you at understanding excessively abstract and complex ideas and breaking them down into manageable bits. It turns out that people good in math are invariably better at understanding equally abstract and complex social, political or economic problems.
In fact, math results have a very strong correlation with future salary and professional achievement. Think about that. Whatever your profession (even if it has no math involved whatsoever), it is highly influenced by how good you were at math in high school.
Every four years, the TIMMS — a comprehensive math and science test — is administered in every country in the world. Attached to the test is a questionnaire on demographics and attitude towards math. In total, it’s a 120 questions long. As you’d imagine, most people abandon somewhere in the process of completing it.
Now, here’s were it gets interesting.
Erling Boe discovered (by accident) that the number of questions not answered on the questionnaire is perfectly correlated with the final score. You can predict with near 100% accuracy the math capabilities of someone without ever asking them a math question. All you need to do is measure how fast they abandon.
We sometimes think about math as innate — you either ‘have it’ or you don’t. In fact, it has nothing to do with ability and all to do with attitude.
Changes the way you think about math, right?
