Numbers, most of us dread them and what they lead to-Maths. But they are very important parts of our lives and we must learn to use them and see it as more that tedious and hard. I was not one of the select few who ‘got’ math and were happy about it. And I, like many others, blamed my school and teachers about it. After all there is some reason for that. My school was not like those Scandinavian modern schools, with the games and flexibility. I learned the (very) old school way-doing math and a lot of it. So for me it became one of those boring things to get through and get over with as fast as I can.
Then I went to university and I had to learn statistics. And ‘Oh gosh’ more mathematics. But at the start our lectors told us that we need not learn how to make the calculations ourselves-there are programs for that. After all we were psychology students-so why grade us on our understanding of statistics. Despite being told that I sat down and started learning formulas and doing calculations. After understanding them I went on to the programs and the analysis of experiments.
Why did I do that? I hadn’t started liking math when I went to university and statistics was not an exception. While it was not as bad and boring as when I was forced to learn math, it was not fun or interesting. I did it because understanding it would help me with what I liked doing-psychology. Statistics is a very big part of experiments and the value for learning it to any social scientist is tremendous when you analyse, design or read research. Any social scientist, or those who will become such, will need to understand it sooner or later-even if they do not have to do the calculations themselves or use it regularly.
As a child I remember being told ‘Math is important’, ‘Math is everywhere’, I knew what they meant-in the way you know some foods are bad but you still eat them. Not until I started playing computer games did my attitude change. An RPG with a math quest to progress to the next level-what are ten or twenty minutes of math if they are followed by two hours of fun play after. Not to mention some games managed to put the task in the flow of the game so well that I did not understand I was doing math until the middle of the problem. And even if they were not as good it was just like when I was in University-having decided to do it myself I was less bored, faster and better at remembering and understanding it. Understanding economics from strategy games worked the same way-maybe even better as I could change things and see how that affected other parts of the world I was building. And let us consider the endless calculations of character ‘stats’ in RPGs as a whole-how much will 10% change, is my 40% critical chance worth having X amount of less damage. I found out later in my life that this was a very valuable experience for me-even if I did not like learning it I liked THAT I learned math. And while many games do not offer such experience there are those who do, and knowing that can be of great use for all-teachers, parents and students.
Thomas Huxley says about education that ‘The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.’ And it seems someone has managed to teach me that principle. And while not the most interesting subject mathematics cannot be left for later our life because we find it boring. We need mathematics and we use it every day and everywhere. While understanding theories from social sciences is important to social scientists and everyone else as well, let us talk about some more day to day use of statistics and by relation-mathematics.
Working as a bartender I was surprised by how many of my colleagues (and some bosses) failed in predicting things around us. They would be surprised by having a bunch of customers on Tuesday despite the last three Tuesdays being full, or would expect a hoard of customers just because Wednesday last week it was packed with people. This might seem like something very simple and that my experience is rare, but think about how many times in customer jobs you had hours in a day in which you had nothing to do. Then in the span of an hour you get packed and crazy amount of work while customers start getting irritated over how slow it is to serve them and everyone gets unhappy. And this is where the true value of mathematics come forth. Many big companies have entire branches delegated to predicting such patterns, but small places do not have that-and need to rely on the owner’s understanding. We try to predict things in our lives all the time and about everything and mathematics would be very helpful for many of those. After all mathematics is the start of any type of explanation of the world-be it engineering, busyness or social sciences.
Learning mathematics wasn’t about remembering the formulas-it was about changing the way I think about the world. Thinking based on my experience but also on why it happened-the last two Wednesdays were packed? Spring started two weeks ago so maybe people will continue coming for the next months, or maybe there was a holiday two weeks ago-on Wednesday so it is still early to decide if it is a trend or just random. Thinking about what causes the changes around us and remembering that some things might have happened to us but our experience could be biased are among the many things I learned from statistics.
