TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Figuring Out The Pattern Of Math

ADVERTISEMENT

By GREGORY McCOLM

Special to the Tribune

Published: April 5, 2009

Mathematics is everywhere. You can hear it howling down Wall Street, carrying off retirement plans. You can see it in the newspapers, reporting the statistical correlation between eating too much cherry pie and getting heart attacks. And you can grip it in your hands as you attempt to persuade your new TV to perform new tricks.

Any time you're dealing with complex patterns of unforgiving precision, you're dealing with math.

This may sound strange because for thousands of years philosophers said that math was just numbers and geometry. But numbers and geometry entail lots of things, like Girolamo Cardano's math of dice games, or Gaspard Monge's math of how to build your house or even Leonhard Euler's math of how to compute mortgage payments. Philosophers now call math "the science of patterns." We know it when we see it.

And we're seeing a lot of it. To underline the point, four major math organizations sponsor a Math Awareness Month each April. This year, the theme is math and the climate. Previous themes include math and voting, the brain, Internet security, the cosmos, art, biology, decision-making, medicine, the environment and so on back to 1986, when President Ronald Reagan helped launch the first Math Awareness Week. Reagan said, "... the application of mathematics is indispensable in such diverse fields as medicine, computer sciences, space exploration, the skilled trades, business, defense and government."

Math not only has diverse applications; it's a diverse subject. If you were told that math is the toolbox you need for the 21st century, you weren't told enough: it's a whole hardware store - and high school algebra is just the first few shelves of a main aisle. Glance down that aisle labeled Algebra and you can see tools for computer graphics, cryptography, crystallography, industrial process design, quantum mechanics, software engineering and stranger things that don't look at all like high school algebra. But these tools are for technical symbolic manipulations with a goal in mind - like high school algebra, and like the work that many of us do every day.

Mathematics requires a lot of training, and some of us remember that training and wonder what it was all for. There's an old Shaolin story (you know, kung fu) about a young monk who was instructed to bend over a barrel full of water and repeatedly sweep his hands through the water. For months. When he visited home, his parents asked him what he had accomplished. Nothing, he grumped, sweeping his hands down on the wood table and breaking it in two.

At least the young monk knows that there's more to kung fu than barrels of water. But many students, and many grown-ups who once were students, never get to see what Galileo meant when he said that mathematics is the language of the universe.

And this may be the problem with our endless efforts to reform mathematics education. Perhaps what we need to do is rethink our attitude toward mathematics. It isn't something out there, strange and alien; it's something that's increasingly part of our daily lives. When we plan our retirement, when we mull over statistical reports, even when we toy with puzzles like Sudoku, we are working on mathematical problems. Math is everywhere, and that's the way it's going to be this century.

Gregory McColm is an associate professor of mathematics at the University of South Florida and a member of three of the four organizations sponsoring Math Awareness Month, www.math aware.org/mam/09/.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT