Do You Really NEED Maths?

“When will I ever use maths in my adult life anyway?”

Hi there! I’m a maths teacher and I get asked this question a lot – whenever I shake hands with another adult or whenever I start teaching a fresh batch of teens who want to give up mathematics in their academic career altogether. 

It’s become such a prevalent regularly asked question that I started a monthly online workshop for people, working adults and adolescents alike, to answer this question in detail. 

You’re free to join it if you ever want to learn handy maths tricks that will make your day-to-day easier, you’d be surprised how accessible and easy it is, but let’s answer that question right now, right here, real quick – do you really need to be good at maths to make it in life?

I’ve got a secret for you, and don’t tell other maths teachers I said this:

NO.

You don’t need maths to make it in life. I agree with you completely, you can live your whole life without ever needing to know mathematics and get by just fine.

So why bother? 

Well, the way I look at it is that you don’t need mathematics to get by in much the same way you don’t need exercise either. You can live your whole life never having worked out even once but we all know the benefits of regular exercise and how it improves your quality of life. 

You breathe better. You have more stamina. You’re less at risk of heart disease and your immunity is stronger. You’re more alert, you have more energy, your sex life is better, your digestion is better. 

Let’s be frank, you don’t need any of these things to live a complete barebones life but the grade of that life is noticeably healthier when you do it, isn’t it? It might even be cheaper in many ways too, considering you avoid a lot of potential medication and procedures and surgeries you might wind up needing later in life to treat the problems you develop due to a sedentary life.

Maths makes your life easier and it’s not as inaccessible as you might have spent your life believing. It’s scary, yes, intimidating and haunting, sure, the source of many a childhood trauma. 

But if you make it work for you, it’s the handiest friend you could ever have and it dramatically improves your quality of life if you have it. Let’s consider areas in your life when you’re already using it: do you know how frequently you use algebra subconsciously?

Every time you do your finances, when you’re working out your salary bump, when you’re ballparking GST, when you’re splitting the bill, you’re unknowingly using algebraic shortcuts without consciously using “x” and “y” to formally calculate it. If you’ve ever commuted and had to work backwards to get anywhere on time, you’re using quick mathematical heuristics to get the answers you need.

But when will I ever use geometry? What’s the point of pi? Who cares? When will that ever come into use? Well it saves me money whenever I order pizza because I can exploit the fact that a lot pizza places don’t know their maths well enough to use in their pricing. 

Did you know that a 12-inch pizza is actually four times the quantity of a 6-inch pizza? Quantity is based on area rather than diameter, you might know this already, but there are so many pizza places in Mumbai that don’t actually know this and price by diameter instead of area. 

I’ve used basic geometry to save on drinks, to know what I’m saving on purchases, it comes in use in so many different products you never even think about. You don’t need this, of course, you might be making enough to not care how much you save, but I know how basic geometry made my life a whole lot less expensive and it’s the quality-of-life change I appreciate having.

And that’s not even stressing the importance of knowing statistics as a second language. 

If you’re fluent with statistics, you cannot be duped and you’ll always have a finger on the pulse of issues affecting populations of people. My mum once asked me why COVID cases were measured on a logarithmic scale as opposed to a linear scale and I pointed out to her how it illuminates the rate more visibly. Many laymen don’t know this and this can be the sort of graph that can confuse anyone and we’ve been relying on this completely to determine how the COVID spread was improving, or worsening, over the past few pandemic years. Haven’t you ever wondered how medical organizations are declaring whether the pandemic is getting better or worse? Wouldn’t you like to know? It’s easier than you think it is.

Knowing statistics makes you immune to spooky headlines. When someone shares an article titled “Evil member of marginalized community harms children and women,” as an excuse for bigotry, you learn to instinctively look at the data to see how prevalent this is and whether it’s statistically relevant. It’s easy to learn how regularly it isn’t, because people with bad agendas cherry-pick whenever they know the statistics don’t support their hatred. You’d be shocked to learn how often people with bad values develop those values because they learned it from statistically illiterate folk who found it easier to read and trust headlines over data.

Hey did you know that maths literally changes the way your brain works? 

Like exercise for your muscles, your brain gets more swoll the more you dead-lift numbers and equations. Whenever you solve a maths problem, two parts of your brain, the analytical left and the 3D-modeling group together to solve it – the analytical part sections problems into digestible parts while the visual part tries to spot patterns and puzzles to put together. 

Your brain isn’t a computer compressing data, it’s an analytical monster artistically seeking out patterns and shapes and forms while simultaneously running them through logical interpretation. It’s both an artist and scientist, it cannot be just one to use maths, you need to be logical and creative to even do maths.

How do you think someone worked out that the numbers-heavy Fibonnaci sequence coincidentally made snail spirals all across nature? How do you think artists paint or sculpt to scale, are they sorcerers? Why aren’t more mathematicians stock brokers if it’s so numbers-heavy? Isn’t it wild how geometry, as a subject, is just shapes and figures married to numbers and logic and mathematical proofs? How do you think someone even imagined imaginary numbers and made it mainstream? 

How do you think someone looked at a circle and thought “hey maybe the ratio between the circumference and diameter is constant no matter the size of the circle, also I’m real hungry and hankering for some pie, does anyone have any pie?”