Useless Math
May 30, 2012
[originally as freshman-English class composition homework, topic free-chosen]
What is the use of math to you and me, an ordinary individual? At first the answer seems obvious. If not an engineer or scientist, who, on earth, truly uses linear algebra, when shopping, to minimize his or her utility cost, graph theory to decide which road he should walk, or differential equations to find how fast he is driving?
Indeed, in everyday life, we hardly require skills more than the familiar the basic arithmetic operations. With the popularity of calculators, even familiarity solely to these is becoming unnecessary. No wonder the public often thinks mathematics is something that only the small group of unworldly intelligentsia called mathematicians should know about.
But mathematics is actually much more than simple arithmetic. Mathematicians generalize what scientist observes, and transform into clear and condensed languages the common structures behind experimental phenomena. It would not be a surprise if we so often find a natural law to be impossible to be expressed without proper mathematics device.
As an extra virtue, math provides the most transparent training of thinking. There is no distance between a student and the theorem. He or she must use his own brain to examine, verify, and absorb the intangible concept. Problems sharpen his mind like no other activities do: he must combine everything he has learned to come up with a fresh, clever solution, and when he does so, an incomparable satisfaction comes along.
However, some may insist, only those that are likely to be an engineer or scientist should be exposed to math. But it would be too late to wait until high school or even university to train students’ ability of abstract thinking. In addition, without proper guide and enlightenment in early childhood in order to develop an interest, those might have been the one solving a long unproven hypothesis may well be put off to mathematics before that.
While some still claims, those professors that focus on pure mathematics are contented in the abstract forms they arbitrarily created, and thus almost never produce useful math tools. They are partly correct, but in general it’s not fair to say so. Although it is true that useful mathematics only makes up a tiny proportion in all investigations mathematicians are engaging in, the most important inventions commonly used in engineering and physics, etc., are absolutely indispensible, and if we restrict the imagination of mathematicians to what’s readily applied, those once-impossible inventions might never have been created.
Furthermore, mathematics, a man-made universe, has its own beauty. Though any theorem is, after all, just a restatement of axioms and definitions, still, as we find an unexpected result, or quite often a particular simple form of an old result, the delight, or at least amazement, is no less than the way we are intuitively pleased by a vivid flower or moved by a touching movie.
At least, I think, it is reasonable to require students spent some effort to learn those not particularly difficult to understand, but most delicate achievements human mind have ever created. In other words, some have to pass the heritage into the next generations, otherwise it would be a pity that those knowledge gradually be forgotten in the ravages of time.
After all, mathematics, like literature or art, has its virtue and hence its place in its own right. They are the most beautiful accomplishment human ever created, and should be cherished as long as we live on this planet.
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