Recent searches
Search options
Seeing someone on Reddit saying that they never used the maths (specifically, “pi”) they learned at school, and that it was pointless learning it.
I have used trigonometry and calculus in my everyday life to make short work of problems, mostly relating to DIY. If you reach middle age without m any this stuff, then I can almost guarantee that you have done several things the hard way when you didn’t need to.
@goatsarah Consider a park which has two paths crossing at right angles. At the junction there is also a circular path going round the outside - like this: ⊕
I used an approximation to pi to confirm that if going straight on it's shorter to use the straight paths, but if going left or right the curved paths are shorter. :)
@goatsarah @lnr whenever this sort of thing comes up, my response is always that the useful thing about learning maths is not necessarily the content but learning how to solve a particular type of problem and think in a certain way. Unfortunately, the way maths is examined means the learning to think aspect is often sidelined in favour of learning to jump through hoops
@alisonkiddle @goatsarah To be honest your Lego problems have been reminding me how much I always enjoyed that sort of looking at patterns and things, without necessarily having a purpose or even direction of thought.
@alisonkiddle @goatsarah @lnr also how maths is taught, wrongly, as being almost entirely abstract. I'm sure there are many ways to use algebra on a day-to-day basis, but I was never taught any real life applications and so I don't use it, but I wish I could. I paid close attention when my teacher was talking about recognising misleading graphs because I recognised the relevance, whereas the rest of maths didn't seem relevant to me when I was 16 
@alisonkiddle @goatsarah @lnr I had to seek AI information on how to use this stuff IRL. If my teacher had said "you can use algebra to help you work out portions when you're cooking", I might have paid more attention in school.
