Maths and real world

In high school, when learning maths I always asked ‘how am I going to use this in the real world?’. Which I never asked for English or Literature or things like that. But maths I saw as something which seemed useless at the time of learning. That it should be be justified.

Now, in my adult life I do use the more complicated bits of maths occasionally, stuff that I didn’t think I would ever use, and probably proclaimed as such in maths classes.

Image by Morley41Wiki (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

One part of maths education that I do value that was drummed in during all the lessons was ‘show your working’. I used to show a lot of my working, going vertically down the page, especially in algebra, where each step allowed you to work it out.
I liked that showing your working allowed you to work out where you made a mistake by working backwards.
It’s something I continue to this day, when working out stuff, I reverse my final result to work out if it still makes sense, if the result reflects where I started, etc.

Pythagoras’ Theorem a^2 + b^2 = c^2, is something at the time I never thought I’d need. But it’s something that I have found I’ve needed to use very occasionally. And needed to use the sine, cos and tan...uh...things. I was working out angles and couldn’t actually remember all of that. I got the three measurements of a triangle but then needed to get online to work out the angles. But I got more than halfway there.
Although one thing I don’t understand how to do, and distinctly recall being told ‘don’t worry you don’t need to know’, is how to do the square root that you need to do to get the final answer out of Pythagoras’ Theorem.

The other day I was trying to work out the area of a back garden. I’d used Google Earth to gain the measurements, but then needed to work out the area. Of a garden which isn’t a regular shape. After copying out onto a piece of paper to help visualise it better than on Google Earth it’s a rectangle and a right angled triangle. At that point I realised that again, high school maths actually works in the real world. Base x Height / divided by 2 (or as I remember it in my mind ‘base times height over 2’) for the triangle and length by width for the rectangle.

I feel like I want to find all my maths teachers from high school and say, thank you, some of the stuff you taught me did stick in my mind and I have used it, in the real world.

Donating

I donate infrequently to things I care about.
I think you need to care about something in order to donate to it, not to be guilted, forced or otherwise coerced into donating.

The people who try to get you to donate to causes in the shopping centres and what not...I just don’t care enough about them. It might be apathetic of me and possibly a little heartless when I actually tell them that when they’ve badgered me when I’ve been walking past, but...I dunno.

When I was in high school, the year levels were bunched into groups of about 20 people to work out charity things that could decide on things to donate to.
The group that I was in decided that a World Vision child would be the thing to donate money to.
I raised the question of wouldn’t it be better / closer to home to donate to indigenous causes, something which I thought was of more concern. The idea wasn’t exactly shut down but the World Vision thing was pushed forward as the better thing to do. At the time I wasn’t in retrospect as vocal as I could have been.
I also and continue to be a bit apathetic to certain causes and things like that.

There are a few things I do donate to;

Recently I have donated to the Alfred Hospital Haematology and Oncology Centre, it’s something close to my heart and a place that provided great care, it’s something I’ll likely continue to donate to for a long time.

The Country Fire Authority (CFA) is something I think all Victorians would donate to, be it chucking some coins into their pot at traffic lights or other donations. (There are similar volunteer fire organisations in other states of Australia). I really think that the CFA members should get more from the government for their contributions to the safety of our country. Even something like free car registrations or something. Considering what they do it seems...disrespectful that we don’t do more for the volunteers.

Finally the other organisation I donate to is the Wikimedia Foundation, which in their own words is “The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects.”.
Wikipedia is something I use probably every day and probably more than once every day. I occasionally edit on Wikipedia as well as just read the articles.
I wholly believe that access to knowledge helps people and Wikipedia is one of the best places to start off your journey into discovering knowledge.
I know people mock Wikipedia’s accuracy, but those inaccuracies can be fixed and will be fixed, especially if someone notes it on the article / article’s talk page. A published reference book will also have inaccuracies and arguably Wikipedia can change faster than any published book be it paper or e-book.
Wikipedia also covers a far, far greater ranger of topics than any publishing house could.

I don’t think Wikipedia should be the only place you go for information, and I think people who suggest it should be are missing the point. All articles on Wikipedia are sourced (or should be), Wikipedia is the start of the journey of discovering things, not the end. With a regular paper encyclopaedia you don’t just read that and stop, you’d seek out other sources. Just so with Wikipedia, you begin there and branch out to look at other sources of information.