And the percentage of people who will be using galois theory in their job every day (or at all) is, what...0.00001%?
Yes, but my point is you can't just write off advanced math.
And, if more people were willing to take higher math, they'd develop skills that would let them go beyond your typical boring day jobs, into better jobs in, well, it's in my post...
I'm not sad that people aren't using more than arithmetic, that's fine, and probably works for them in their mediocre employment. I'm sad that people aren't living up to their own potential.
Math teaches you to think; there is nothing more valuable than that.
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house." -Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love", Robert A. Heinlein
It makes me sad to see that there are actually comments here that claim most people only need arithmetic and fractions. Well, first of all, the majority of people I know have trouble even doing that. I'm convinced that it's because elementary school teachers (at least here in the US) are *education* majors and can get through college without taking even a basic college level math class (the remedial courses are *not* college level).
But, since one of my majors in college was math, I have seen the valuable skills math gives you to go into any science or tech field, most business fields (in fact if more business majors did *real* statistics in college, they'd be much more valuable to the companies that hire them), and even law.
Proof, logic, and statistics (which requires calculus if you do it right) teaches people to think.
But perhaps by "upper level" people are thinking abstract? It's true that abstract math is mostly a play field for us mathies, but even some extremely abstract stuff has proven to be very important in computer science hundreds of years after it was merely played with. (See:cryptography, error checking codes/coding theory, Galois theory.)
I was also a computer science major and continue in that vein for work; some of the best computer scientists and programmers I have met were also originally math majors.
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Yes, but my point is you can't just write off advanced math.
And, if more people were willing to take higher math, they'd develop skills that would let them go beyond your typical boring day jobs, into better jobs in, well, it's in my post...
I'm not sad that people aren't using more than arithmetic, that's fine, and probably works for them in their mediocre employment. I'm sad that people aren't living up to their own potential.
Math teaches you to think; there is nothing more valuable than that.
This reminds me of the quote:
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house." -Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love", Robert A. Heinlein
Thank you for your insightful comment!
It makes me sad to see that there are actually comments here that claim most people only need arithmetic and fractions. Well, first of all, the majority of people I know have trouble even doing that. I'm convinced that it's because elementary school teachers (at least here in the US) are *education* majors and can get through college without taking even a basic college level math class (the remedial courses are *not* college level).
But, since one of my majors in college was math, I have seen the valuable skills math gives you to go into any science or tech field, most business fields (in fact if more business majors did *real* statistics in college, they'd be much more valuable to the companies that hire them), and even law.
Proof, logic, and statistics (which requires calculus if you do it right) teaches people to think.
But perhaps by "upper level" people are thinking abstract? It's true that abstract math is mostly a play field for us mathies, but even some extremely abstract stuff has proven to be very important in computer science hundreds of years after it was merely played with. (See:cryptography, error checking codes/coding theory, Galois theory.)
I was also a computer science major and continue in that vein for work; some of the best computer scientists and programmers I have met were also originally math majors.