Sunday, February 21, 2010

Math in our everyday life!!

“There has never been a good time to be a mathematician.”

In today’s society, everything falls on math. All the careers have some math concept involved in somehow. This has been the case for several years, but nowadays, as evolutions keeps on going farther, the need of math increases. Statistics is used in the medical field to determinate the improvement of health conditions, in business to improve the quality of work done, in security agencies to insure the safety of the citizens.

First, this article explains the pros of math and its development. The world is now dominated by Web2.0. Education, entertainment, shopping, careers, etc. everything can be done online, and this won’t be possible without the contributions of mathematicians. Since they are much needed in today’s society, the article suggests that students, especially in America, should be encouraged to pursue their careers in math or math related major fields. The example is given in the case of the NSA which employs only US citizens. From here, it can be concluded that the security of Americans is limited, since it is less than what it could be.

The other side of the article explains how these ongoing improvements in the math’s world are quite disturbing. Since people are concerned about the privacy problem, it’s hard to make improvement in medicine for example. Since much of these math based programs use people’s private information, there have been some complaints about this, and they are refusing to give up their information to the public. This pushed mathematicians, doctors and other concerned people to look for other alternatives in their problem solving strategies

Overall, this article made me think about all the connections that can be made between the world of math, which is always perfect (with exact answers), and the real world, which is always a cumulative result of more or less estimations and probabilities. There have been some times when, in the middle of class or while doing a math problem, I said to myself “when am I ever going to use this?” This article reminded me that’s always a rhetorical question I have in mind, that somewhere in the back of my conscious mind I know that I will use it. It also reminded me the saying that says “Math is related to Physics, Physics related to Chemistry, Chemistry related to Biology, and Biology related to Life.” So, in the end, math is related to our lives, either directly or indirectly.

1 comment:

  1. Your last paragraph reminded me of a cartoon I really like, in particular this one:

    http://xkcd.com/435/

    Its a really good cartoon in general, a lot of math jokes, a lot of computer science jokes.

    ReplyDelete