Hunter Nuckols - Assignment 5

Oftentimes, talking to strangers, friends, and/or family about math can be a tricky task.  Most people think that math is too ‘hard’ for them or that they were never ‘good’ at math, and seemingly have little to no thoughts about math beyond this.  And then when I tell someone that I am a math major, the typical response is “oh, so do you want to be a teacher?”  So why is it that most people think that this subject that is so incredibly difficult is only useful for teaching?  Not that there is anything wrong with teaching, but it’s silly that math is only associated with one profession in the public eye.  There must be some reason it is one of the core subjects, other than that it is ‘hard.’  This is where I try to explain just where math can be found and how extremely useful it is.  Even if one is bad at computation (for example, when they say “I never could remember my times tables.”) the concepts of math are very powerful.  I usually give examples of professions where math is used heavily and an example of how that profession uses math.  For example, I might say that an actuary uses a lot of math to calculate statistical probabilities of a set of occurrences happening to influence the insurance industry, or that a mechanical engineer needs math to calculate the strength of his/her materials (among other things), and so forth.  Once I have named a few professions, usually very profitable ones, people begin to understand, to some degree, the importance of mathematics.

Unfortunately, I do not believe that these individual conversations have any impact on national investment in mathematics.  However, these conversations are a good start.  To influence political leaders to value investing in math and science, we need to expand upon these conversations and we need to start them at an earlier age.  Maybe if we explain to young students why they are learning algebra, geometry, and calculus and how it can be applied, then it will spark more interest and determination.  This should also be done the other way around: take what the students are interested in and show how math is applied to that area.  For instance, if someone had told me that I could use derivatives to calculate marginal productivity of capital, I may have become more interested in economics; likewise, if I were interested in economics, one might tell me that I needed derivatives to calculate marginal productivity of capital and this could have sparked an interest in math.  Basically what it boils down to, is we need more math awareness.  The more aware everyone is, the more people it can reach and hopefully more social awareness and understanding will lead to an outpouring of need for funding to facilitate its growth.