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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.

in reply to Sarah Brown

Eleanor LNR Blair
Eleanor LNR Blair
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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. 😀

in reply to Sarah Brown

Alison Kiddle
Alison Kiddle
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@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
@Eleanor LNR Blair
in reply to Alison Kiddle

Eleanor LNR Blair
Eleanor LNR Blair
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@alisonkiddle 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.
@Alison Kiddle
in reply to Alison Kiddle

Llwynog
Llwynog
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@alisonkiddle @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 😞
@Eleanor LNR Blair @Alison Kiddle
in reply to Llwynog

Llwynog
Llwynog
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@alisonkiddle @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.
@Eleanor LNR Blair @Alison Kiddle
Unknown parent

Sarah Brown
Sarah Brown
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@Maddie T It’s not “needed”. You can pretty much always do it without.

It’s just that you can usually do it faster or easier or better with.

in reply to Sarah Brown

Eve (?), she/her (?), secret spooky romulan (?)
Eve (?), she/her (?), secret spooky romulan (?)
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I regularly use the area of a circle to figure out the best pizza value for money
in reply to Sarah Brown

Eve (?), she/her (?), secret spooky romulan (?)
Eve (?), she/her (?), secret spooky romulan (?)
• •
It's easier when you're drunk to translate to units of pi^2/£, rather than square inch/£
in reply to Sarah Brown

Povl
Povl
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making a cake this weekend, I calculated its circumference from the diameter to determine how long a strip of marcipan to make for the edge. Also regularly use volume calculations to roughly determine “Will the remains in this (cylindrical) pot fit in this (rectangular cuboid) container?”
in reply to Sarah Brown

Gen X-Wing
Gen X-Wing
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I’ve used very little of the math they tried to teach me and forgotten an awful lot of it:(

But my opinion wasn’t that it was a pointless thing to be taught, but that school did one hell of a bad job at doing it:( At one point I was good at maths (at least compared to my peers) and slowly they sucked every bit of fun and wonder out of it:(

⇧