As an introvert, I'd rather not meet people on a normal day. On the very few days that I do meet people, they are mostly shocked by the fact that I love mathematics. And just like clockwork, I am usually confronted with the proud exclamation: “Oh, I've always been terrible in math!”
For no other subject in the curriculum would adults be so proud of failure. Can I put it to you today that being weak in mathematics is NOT a badge of honor. You should be embarrassed to admit imcompetence in the field of mathematics.
I get this question of why math is important lots of times. Let me answer this with a brief story.
During the Second World War, the American military was faced with a huge problem. Their planes were being shot by enemy fighters and they planned to put reinforcement on these planes for fortification.
But like most solutions, this had a big unanswered question. Where does the reinforcement even go on the plane? Too much metal makes the plane heavy and too little armour makes the plane less secure. There had to be a balance somewhere.
But where was it?
The American military approached Abraham Wald who was an amazing mathematician to help them out with this issue. The data they had showed that their returning planes were being hit on the fuselage more than they were on the engines.
The military wanted to cover the fuselage with more armour because that was where it was being hit the most. Makes sense, right?
Well, no. The answer Wald gave was not what they were expecting.
Wald told them that the armour had to go to the unhit parts of the planes more (Which were the engines). Counterintuitive, but think about it this way. The data showed that the planes had more hits in the fuselage because the planes which were hit in the engines never returned to the base.
The fact that the majority of returning planes had more bullet holes in the fuselage meant that hits to the fuselage could be withstood, so if anywhere, armour could be spared there. It is the same way we find more people injured in the leg than in the chest in the hospital.
The chest is the point of greatest vulnerability so it makes sense that we wear bulletproof vests there. The answer to the military's conundrum all came down to the way they thought. Mathematics makes people think more objectively!
Math is usually annoying because of how it is taught. In kg, you were taught using the process of regurgitation (where you would be shown 1 + 3 and you shout 4) and that was fine.
But in high school, when you heard f(x) = 1 + 3, you were baffled and bored. Because the KG process did not teach you how to solve math the high school level math in the right way.
Math is not a process, it is a toolbox of operations you apply to new situations. Knowing the process is important, but it does not make you good at math. In the save vein, knowing how to spell does not make you a good journalist.
