John Gavin Issue Exploration Essay 12/1/13

The amazing thing about math is its phenomenally cool history and future. As I was researching this paper I came across so many interesting things to me. Vihart was so interesting in the way she teaches math with art and music. Gary and Kennys web page was the turning point in my attitude towards math. The way that they explained what math is got me very curious. I spent over 200 hours learning about algebra this last semester. And the last half of the semester I have really enjoyed learning. Finding out how important math is to our daily lives. How life changing math and statistics can be to learn. Author Benjamin on TED talks said that if people would learn basic statisics then there lives would change for the better. All of the choices that we make each day would be better made if we understood the statistics of our choice being to our benefit. Our financial life would be better because we could balance our budgets better. All in all if there is one thing I would tell people to do is to learn math in a different way, a fun way and improve their lives. Now I will tell you some of the things that I have learned about why maths history and future are amazing. The understanding of math and its many theories is not a simple undertaking. It takes time and many building blocks. Math builds on one idea to the next until you get a full understanding of the math world. You begin with real numbers like 1,2,3. Then you progress to adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. Then after you have built the basic building blocks with this understanding you can move on to fractions, graphs, logs and beyond.
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Personally, I dont think the human mind is made to be able to understand the entirety of it all. The concept of infinity is too large for most to understand. How big is our universe. Also too big. But we dont need to understand that to understand math. Knowing the percent of chance that we are going to succeed in an endeavor greatly improves our life. Some people spend lots of money on gambling and lotto tickets in hopes of getting rich. If they understood the odds of that happening are less likely that getting hit by lightning then maybe they would choose something else. Like the math of investing 10 dollars a week from the age of 18 into a interest bearing account that they would have a million dollars in that account by the time they are 60. The odds of being successful with this endeavor are so much higher. And costs about the same. My favorite thing about math is that it is very black and white. If you follow a path then you can get to a destination. I thought that math was just some random tricks that some one thought up to make numbers perform weirdly. Reading the history taught me that math is man learning from nature and writing down what they see. One apple plus one apple equals two apples. This is truth in nature. I like that math is the measurement of nature. It is interesting that through history some people have fought against the facts of math. Some even went as far as killing and imprisonment of people for explaining their ideas. The 0, for example, was very controversial. Some said it was false because it messed up their understanding of addition. But it proved to be very beneficial to the understanding of numbers. And algebra would not be with out the 0. We would still be using roman numerals and would not have the civilization that we have today. The fibonanicci numbers are just numbers seen in nature. The petals of a flower, and the leaves and pine cones and many things in nature follow this sequence. The math that was observed by an apple falling from a tree equaled 6 feet per second. Algebra was just the
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measurement of a triangle. With this information man was able to create the math to fly to the moon. With this math man created was to farm enough food too feed the planet. This proceeded to imaginary numbers. These numbers cannot be shown on a number line. These numbers are critical to the function of computers and algorithms. Imaginary numbers allow us to make calculations that were before impossible. Dividing a number by 0 makes a false answer. Dividing a number by 0i make an imaginary number that can then be tranfered into other math to create useful answers that we could not have before. I think algorithms are so amazing scary. This is the process of combining math into computer programs and using if/then statements to get to a destination. All the programs that you use on your computer uses algorithms. The computer reads the keystroke and does if/then statements decides what to do based on this input. The computer program can learn from its journey. If certain things happen in the process of the program running then it rewrites itself so that I the next loop of the programming it handles situations differently. There is a TED talk about how there are algorithms that are out in the internet so big and complex that they are lost and not under the control of a human. There is a department that deals with following the graphs of the stock market. Sometimes a graph will show up completely different then what they know it should show. This is because of a rogue algorithms. They take a picture of it and put it on the wall to show the chaos in the internet world. Right now they havent found how it is causing serious problems. Maybe in the future it might. If the people in opposition of math in the past would have succeeded in stopping math many of the things we take for granted would not be available for us today. We couldnt have
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crossed the ocean to America without the math to navigate the stars. Algebra in fundamental to the engineering of buildings. The measurement of triangle created the ability to make structures that would last to create libraries and universities were people could learn and create more things to benefit the quality of life in the world. You can measure the quality of life around the world by there education in math. Everywhere that there is poverty and a poor quality of life there is a low education level in math. To create canals and ponds and farming math is essential. Agriculture uses math in the use of the calendar that the Mians created thousand of years ago. Without it they could not measure their growing season. How much water and fertilizer to use. How much to sell their product for. Math is everywhere and is underappreciated. I think that the education system is destroying childrens minds. At a very early age we learn fear and hatred of subjects like math and English and writing. The way that we are taught is boring and repetitious. And we are punished if we do not understand. And if we do understand early then we are bored because we have to wait while the teacher repeatedly says the same thing in the same way trying to get the rest of the class to understand. How great would it be to take kids out into a park and explain math with nature. Show how it all makes sense in the world around us. To make kids curious at what else nature has to teach us. To look at the stars and start counting how many there are. To be able to draw, doodle, sing and dance to learn math and English. In conclusion, If I knew how to bottle up my enthusiasm of learning as I have been able to have this semester it would change the world. Watching my baby learn to walk and her curiosity is like what I feel. It will be interesting to see what nature has to teach us in the future and I hope that man uses the information of math to continue to improve the quality of life for man on this planet and does not use this information to exterminate life on this planet.
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