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
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.
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.
https://xkcd.com/687/
or the Planck energy drops.
I have a funny feeling that if that one happens, it stops being anybody’s problem
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
You can use a discipline that is named “measurement of the earth” to…measure earth? Fascinating!
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.