I’ve been thinking about it as I’ve gotten older as to why with it’s important as opposed to the blank definitions given to us then just expected to know.
1. How much? Measurements
Math in the most simplest form is asking the amount of something. What amount? It doesn’t matter.
Hence why it is commonly called theories or a theorem — they’re blind. It’s about conceiving something that you cannot see right in front of you or are too abstract away from you.
It’s also about measuring objective things as well, but to start, in the sense of like an exam, it’s a theoretical amount you can’t see.
So with that in mind, adding apples together then subtracting from a total is the amount in a basket. But without real world context to give symbolic details, it can get lost when you focus on just numbers.
Most of the time, it’s literal. Asking, literally, how much is there? Whats left over? What changed? But in this distant, non-visible, abstracted space.
It’s hard to grasp something you can’t have some sort of tangibility. It’s why they encourage pictures, but even then, how do you explain the further reasons of abstraction when so fixated on the method of how to attain an answer — not the why an answer is needed.
So for the lack, I can say just from experience, it’s to improve the accuracy of a guess. It’s to make a theoretical basket of apples more real, even in a virtual space. It’s why anything technology related is first issued as numbers. It’s trying to create the imagined space as something ‘tangible’ while not. Virtual. Like reading this. How much?
2. Why multiplication, division?
It’s to relieve yourself of the burden of long winded adding and subtracting. That’s it. The whole rigmarole of it.
The root of numbers is 1 to 10. Ten being just 1, again, but in a greater amount. It’s obviously not 1 but it’s the repetition in effort to condense how much it is a repeating series.
So when you add or subtract, it’s going to always fall in the categories of numbers 0 to 9. Those are the foundational numbers you’ll always see no matter how long the number is visually speaking. 1 is single, 10 is one added on top of itself that many times. And any subtraction you do will fall in those same lines.
100 is the 10 added on itself, ten times. 10 being the ‘0’ in this series, it’s a sequence. It starts over with another 0 added or subtracted to gage how much it is.
How much is also applicable to anything. Height, length, width, distance, time. It’s getting a tangible grasp of patterns that can be quantified - letting us understand it and the cycles they manifest.
This is how science flirts with math.
3. Letters? Formulas? Fractions?
Letters are place holders. I was always confused by them — why?
It’s unironically try to condense a much longer and weightier amount while leaving some room for the inserted factor aka X. They call this the ‘variable’ aka whatever Thing you need measured inserted into this formula that’s a short cut to a drawn out process of adding/subtracting.
There’s ordering too — in Algebra II it introduces it more.
The parenthesis are for what’s the first steps of the amount adjustment. Usually they give examples in the text just to tell you the amount of something. Can be weight, can be time, whatever already said above — a number or predisposition of why you’re doing this.
If not for this short hand formula, you’d first take whatever the main amount is, subtract. Then multiply by factor A. Factor B is constant with + 3 — why? Because of some physical rule. That certain things are always added or subtracted to better taper the final amount.
It’s more or less a recipe. If you don’t have the X factor in its transformed state before the transformed B factor, it will fall apart or be inaccurate like with a cooking recipe. It’s about getting it to the more realized point or foci of the abstract concept — a shadow. Is it thick? No, is it tall? Maybe! Depends on what surface. Is it wide — same answer as before.
It’s also guessing about an apple in a tree that you cannot see but you are given some details.
Most math isn’t about the objects, they’re testing to see if you know how to attain the answer, accurately.
Because you can get the answer wrong right? Even though you did all the steps?
It’s about what the most accurate end result is and why all those steps need to be taken in order for said accuracy. It’s why even if you take the correct steps, do the math, and get an answer — but still somehow wrong — why? Cause of inaccuracy.
It matters in places that I’ve worked in like injections, or pushing a small amount of medication into a IV directly to a patient in the span of a minute.
So their heart doesn’t stop from the medication injected directly to the blood stream from being too fast — a real hazard.
This need for accuracy breeds perfectionism, keep in mind. It’s why people are more so afraid of math, it isn’t doing the work, it’s doing it and being wrong for some matter or another.
The psychological issues with math is how it is taught to be intolerant of messes you’d find in other subjects. It likes to be Yes/No or this or that.
You can argue subject matter about anything, psychology, ethics, but try arguing 2+2 =1?
Unless it’s -2+3=1. Then it’d work.
If nursing taught me anything, it was about justifying why each step in necessary in a sequence. This type of justification, rationale, why are we doing this? Is absent in majority of education.
Maybe it is blitzed over, or you just forget — but are expected to know like you did when you were first told it, as you were little.
The important thing to critical thinking regardless of subject is that rationale. It is something that can be contemplated and theorized, debated, and adjusted. Math has rationale, it’s full of it actually.
It has to be cut and dry not to the detriment of the student, but for it to work as a system entirely.
Mathematical application is absent in the basics of learning, but it should be a reminder. For me, rounding was critical.
My heart had stopped many times when it came to dosage calculations and if I had to round a number or not, or if I could.
It’s not a math problem. It’s how much liquid do I pull for my patient without harming them from too much or too little — to achieve what we call therapeutic effect or levels — the range it works?
And if I can’t get a 95% on a ten question test of formulas that assist me in finding how many drops per minute is required from a X mL bag — then I’d be too unsafe to be a nurse.
Remembering it still makes me want to vomit from the sheer nerves I felt. Even if I passed, I was wrecked with just the experience of such anxiety. Over math. But it wasn’t about that, it was about my worthiness to continue in this program or be flunked out instantly. Come back next year.
I got a lot of academic trauma.
It’s the application of math that gives it purpose, and for as much focus there is on how to — the application where it helps you, yourself, is what gives it meaning.
If it has no meaning to you, then it will exist meaningless until it finds a way where it has to be meaningful. Even if you forget, it can be learned again and again.
Math likes to hold hands with Science for good reason — not all things in science we can interact with.
Why is outer space described with numbers and formulas? Because we cannot reach it. It just isn’t possible to touch a star. It’s that simple.
Limitations are the reasons we use these tools to guess again and again what something is and just how much of it is there?
Doing it in a cycle sequence that compounds and interacts with itself is the few ways we can even conceive of it. Can you measure the mass of a black hole? Do you have any idea how wide its horizon is?
Why is there a speed of light? What is time really, what’s time dilation? Is it a place? Can we travel through it as we do on a road? How do we compare to our measurements?
It’s the questions often postulated by science which math attempts to make some what real, some what tangible. It even measures the medium a sample is captured in — a photograph.
Each pixel is a measurement, is an approximate amount of space. That means the space of stars on a dotted page full of them each have a mathematical approximation of distance from the POV of the camera itself — you the viewer. And that’s used to measure how far away they might be - and the way light was actively touching the lens from that present distance.
The speed of light from stars that may or may not exist anymore.
They don’t know, but they can guess. Math helps with that.
It’s also readily adjusted too. It’s why there’s a lot of erasing and re-approximation involved. Why they compound — it takes the limitations of whatever device is being used, the amount of it, and the positions it captures these things from a single angle.
Information is needed to quantify. Otherwise, it’s 0 to 9 a million different times as endless as the wind until it ceases to blow.
