When I was preparing to approach the topic of "How is mathematics used by the public domain?", I thought about some of the more obvious uses first. Some of these include money transactions, and in reporting of statistics. However as I paid more specific attention to the news and everything around me I noticed that there is evidence of mathematics used everywhere in almost everything. I thought about how mathematics is used to make sense of some 0f the everyday concepts we encounter. On small example, is the fact that when you use certain items one can expect there to be a line of symmetry. Examples of this range from a sheet of notebook paper, the car you drive, the bed you sleep on, to the computer screen that you are looking at all have at least one line of symmetry which makes them appear as normal to us.
All of the news articles and print media that I have recently observed had at least one reference to mathematics. One of the articles was titled "Cost Conscious" which referred to the state of the economy, stock market, and inflation which all revolve around the mathematical interpretation of data. Another article was about the closing of food factories in China which was also explained using mathematical percentages. A very interesting article was about how half of humanity will be living in cities, as oppose to rural areas, by the year 2030 which again required mathematical reasoning to predict. One last article that I found also to be very interesting was about riots in Iran because of laws that will ration out fuel. The law will only allow private car owners to purchase 100 liters of fuel per month which led to rioting. The math connection is shown in the fact that someone had to mathematically figure out that 100 liters per month would be an amount that would allow their economy to function.
In the overall scope of things I see mathematics being used everyday by everyone both consciously and unconsciously. In fact it is a tool that allows us to function and make sense of the world around us. The concept of mathematics can be learned and recognized by anyone, and its use is critical to our future.
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2 comments:
Well I to found the same thing, math is all around us. In reflecting on the assignment, I have realized this is what we need to take to the classroom. This awareness of how mathematics influences our daily lives may help us find the connections to share with our students. I was not aware how much mathematics influences our daily lives.
How can people hate math, yet we use it as a tool to make sense of the world? Ironic, huh? Well maybe we could attribute it to "that's America for ya."
You took math even beyond the superficial. Thank you for helping me to take a more critical look.
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