I have little patience for adults who complain/brag they never use the math they learned in school. I use high school math—algebra, geometry, trigonometry—routinely. Calculating fractions and proportions, cutting big things into little things, figuring out where to plant for sun or shade, ordering cubic yards of soil, buying enough paint to cover a wall.
That level of math is a fundamental part of how I interact with the world. I don’t really understand how people get through life without it.
As a physics major, I dove into the deep pool of calculus and realized that all the high school stuff was preliminary. Calculus is where math really begins. And gets profound!
The foundation of calculus is slicing up space and time into an infinite number of infinitely tiny bits. When you do that, you can describe phenomena you otherwise couldn’t, from the flow of water through a pipe to the drift of galaxies through the cosmos.
I admit I don’t use calculus in everyday life. It goes much deeper. Beyond its usefulness as a computational tool, calculus changed how I see the world.
The more I studied F = ma, E = mc2, Maxwell’s and Schrodinger’s equations, etc., the more I realized that math was less about plugging in numbers and disgorging answers than an abstract but robust philosophical approach to life. I’ve forgotten how to solve partial differential equations, but the truth that mathematics lies at the foundation of all reality will stay with me forever.
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