Mathematical musings

After high school, I studied political philosophy, law and theology. All fall into the "arts and humanities" disciplines. And yet today I've been thinking about how really useful it was to do a little math(s). Yes, mathematics was useful for getting into the university and course of my choice. And no, I never officially 'used' my maths after high school (unlike my DH, whose current research consists more of equations than of words).

But here are just a few ways I use math(s) now, a list which (when I consider it), should be ample encouragement for just about anyone to keep working at school-level maths, "even if they're never going to use it in their job". And so on to the list. I'm glad I can do a little math(s), so that:

* when I phone my family all across the world, I can figure out what time it is there BEFORE I wake them up in the middle of the night and incur their wrath.
* when I'm at the grocery store and I see that an item which usually costs 29c is on "special" for "3 for $1", I know it's not a good deal.
* when I pull out my cooking book and the recipe calls for "250ml of water and 250g of flour", I can ball-park estimate how many ounces that is in US measurements.
* when I look up what a different credit card could offer me compared to the one I have, and it offers 5% rewards on groceries but costs $75 a year... I have an idea of how much I would need to spend on groceries to break even...

And that was just this week. And, with the exception of the last one where I was sitting at my desk doing the research, they were all little bits of math(s) I needed to do in my head for them to be useful. A phone app would take too long. And if I couldn't do just that little bit of arithmetic in my head, who knows how much halloween candy I might land up buying on "special" :-)

And so today I'm remembering my math(s) teachers with fondness. More than history, or english, or even science classes - my school maths education has been surprisingly useful.