Why do we need math?
It’s confusing. It’s complicated. At times, most times, it’s arduous work to understand. And to a lot of people, it feels as if most of the content taught in school is irrelevant and unnecessarily complex. I mean, it’s pretty obvious that learning to count is kind of important, but what’s the point of learning about sine and cosine waves? Why learn about the unit circle? What’s the use of long division when the most math we use in our daily lives is summing up quarters and dimes? Especially since, with the advancement of electronic payments, even that skill is becoming obsolete.
So…why do we need it? Why spend years of our lives mandatorily learning about the ins-and-outs of something that some of us end up leaving behind at graduation anyways?
Simple answer: it forces us to think.
Bear with me for a bit as I give you a little anecdote to set up my (slightly loosey goosey and very personal) argument. After three years in a program that’s basically forced me to dunk my head in numbers, I’ve found that math never gets any less complicated. In fact, the complexities just keep on mutating into convoluted monstrosities that could sometimes take me hours to even slightly understand. At first I hated it—I’d always felt my brain could absorb new concepts like a sponge, and then suddenly, it was like I couldn’t even differentiate between a positive number and a negative number.
The thing I thought I’d most excelled at had become my greatest weakness and I was losing grip on why I’d gone into my degree in the first place—how could I have enjoyed something so irritatingly confusing?
And I realized that I had two options: ditch my program and hope for the best or find a different way to appreciate it.
Obviously I’d decided to stick it through and go with the latter, and I’d found the comforting and uncomplicated answer that math wasn’t just something for me to have to know—it was something for me to be curious about.
Like a child who wonders why the sky is blue or why snow is cold or why the Sun dips beneath the horizon in the evening—I know basically nothing, but I have an entirely different world to explore. I had new things to be curious about!
Not even just that, but it also forced me to change how I thought—math forces us to think critically as to understand the inner workings of a theorem, carefully so as to not make small mistakes in our calculations, and creatively to find ways to solve advanced problems with the tools we’re given. And, luckily enough, these are skills that are extremely valuable in other areas of life.
And, in addition to why we need it…why do people love it?
Personally, my favorite thing about math is the romance of it all; a language that was developed over eons, that allows us to make some sense of both what’s happening at the atomic level and what’s happening in the great vastness of space, is something truly romantic—truly poetic.
Many people over the course of history have described the connection between math and poetry and, most keenly, the likeness between the two. That is, that they are “the utterance of the same power of imagination, only that in the one case it is addressed to the head, and in the other, to the heart.” How I see it, poetry aims to encapsulate the truths of the universe in a few lines of text, and in a way, math does the same thing.
My love for math sprouts from the idea that it’s our great attempt at trying to understand our universe. It’s a way for humans to attempt to attach reason—attach meaning—to the little things we keep discovering. It’s our way of trying to understand the signals that our reality keeps sending us. Math isn’t just our way of describing the universe, it’s our way of communicating with it—and what’s more romantic than that?
