Mathematics is life

Anytime I hear a small group of people talking ill about mathematics, I get so irritated. I know I’m not a math person, but I appreciate the importance of math in our everyday lives. I’ll thus be the last to throw tantrums at the subject and its enthusiasts.

In my second review of "Think Big," a book by Prof. Dr. Ben Carson, I attempted to shed light on the essence of mathematics. Oftentimes, those who attended school but didn’t receive a proper education have a favorite verse they quote: “What has ‘finding X’ ever done for us?” asserting that math is useless after school.

In the book, it was noted that even though Curtis Carson (Dr. Ben Carson’s older brother) had no problem with mathematics, he wasn’t enthusiastic about geometry and geometrical designs. More than once, Curtis complained about geometry homework he had to solve during their childhood. His rant was that the geometry problems were too arduous and irrelevant.

But their mother (Sonya Carson) put her foot down and insisted her son (Curtis) become proficient, despite his protests about geometry and geometrical designs, saying, “Know it better than anyone in the class.” Curtis mastered geometry and later became a successful aeronautical engineer. He designs aircraft brakes for major engineering firms, which requires him to use a wide variety of geometrical formulas and analytical skills. Imagine if he hadn’t persevered.

Revisiting these life-learning lessons from the book "Think Big" was prompted by an encounter at Timber Market two days ago. There was an old man, a shop owner of bamboo trees, who served us some of his products. Interestingly, while the loading was being done, he had a method of inspecting the quantity to ensure there was neither oversupply nor undersupply.

Whenever the loaders moved a bamboo tree, he’d mark a straight line on a slate with chalk. He was so concentrated that he didn’t entertain any sort of interruption. He repeated these marks, and on the fifth count, he then struck through the four lines he had marked. I asked Hafiz to see if he noticed what I did. This old man was effectively using tally marks, something we all learn from core mathematics under the rubric of cumulative frequency curves.

If an old man has leveraged tally marks to work efficiently, why would a young man see nothing relevant about finding X? I wonder why people still maintain that math, or finding X, is useless. Meanwhile, we do basic arithmetic every day. My childhood friend, who ran away from school and is now a plumber, does his work by taking measurements, cutting, and fixing pipes to exact measurements. My other friends who are masons do the same thing with getting the right proportions of sand, stones, and cement. So what has changed?

But you know what? There’s a level of truth in the saying that people find a way to make nonsense of anything they’re not good at. Sadly, some of our young people are veering towards the belief that mathematics is another nuisance. Well!

Nothing they taught us in school was “useless.” It’s because some of us either suffer from an assimilation defect or engage in deliberate intellectual dishonesty.