Outstanding! But you didn’t show your work, so you only get half credit 
Now, do all you “I don’t need math cuz of my calculatin’ machine” people understand why it’s 7.8%, and not 7.56%? If you understand exactly why, then you’re better off than a whole buttload of bankers I’ve dealt with over the years.
That’s right, honest to god professional bankers.
I am hideous at history. Almost failed every course I took in high school. I usually can’t even handle biographies - I get so bored I always put them down. Which is very strange. People are definitely inclined towards (or against) specific subject areas.
I want to add something to the rant: STATISTICS. They may be boring and you may not see any immediate use to them, but they are used SO often (“54% of Americans …”), and often SO irresponsibly (“sample size = 7”) that if you don’t have a basic grasp of how they work, you will be easily duped, confused, misled, and so on. Drives me bonkers to see people swallow really bad statistics.
A firm grasp of stats is also very helpful in things like risk management and even rhetoric. ‘Confirmation bias,’ for example, can become clear once you apply a bit of stastical analysis.
For example: “I had a dream about my friend John last night, who I haven’t seen in ages, and then he called me! How strange !”
Conclusion A: I must be psychic!
Conclusion B: I dream about people I haven’t seen in ages pretty regularly. Most of the time, they don’t call the next day. Out of all the people I dream about, only ONE called the next day - that’s a pretty small proportion. In absence of any other info, it’s likely a co-incidence.
I don’t want to be a snob and say “If you don’t know anything about stats, then shut up.” I’d much rather say “Please learn a little about stats so you can make good use of them.” It’s a wonderful thing when you get to know it.
Count me as another person who thought she was naturally bad at math until she hit the higher levels. In elementary and junior high schools, I was always in the top class, but I didn’t make easy A’s the way I did in my other subjects. It wasn’t stimulating for me, and comprehension didn’t come naturally.
Also, I often found that the way teachers explained concepts just didn’t sit right with me. When I would ask for a clarification, my question was usually met by the teacher repeating what she had said in exactly the same language and acting as though I wasn’t paying attention. Some students need to approach concepts from a different angle, but, unfortunately, not many teachers I had were willing or able to approach concepts from a different perspective.
It wasn’t until I hit Calculus in high school that I really began to excel. I credit my turnaround to a tutor I went to from the local engineering school. I only had 5 or 6 sessions with him, but I learned that actually sitting down with the text and figuring things out for myself went much further than trying to decode confused class notes. I ended up getting a Math minor in college, and I went on to a graduate degree in Economics.
See, now this is what drives me crazy about people that get, and are good at math. They skip all the steps and assume that we understand all the, what are to THEM, “little” unimportant steps.
What does y represent? what does x represent, what do the poor innocent parenthesis (those belong to LANGUAGE dammit, NOT math) represent? what does the f mean? how do you know how to fit them together and when, and how?
I’m going to go take a nap now, I just wore myself out.
This was college professor too. He didn’t just tell me I was psychologically unsound, he went on lecturing me for 20 minutes about what a sick young woman I was, until I was completely in tears.
Don’t worry, my boyfriend is a whiz at math, I’m in awe of his abilities. And he claims to be in awe of my writing and language skills. Not all of us “mathphobes” avoid mathnerds
I didn’t show my work because I used a four-function calculator. I don’t know how to do the calculation properly. 
1.0x1.0063x1.0063x1.0063x1.0063
x1.0063x1.0063x1.0063x1.0063
x1.0063x1.0063x1.0063x1.0063
I don’t know how math works, but I do understand the concept of compounding interest…
He told me that because after two weeks of struggling to figure things out I finally went to him and explained that I wasn’t getting it and in fact was falling farther and farther behind, and asked what I could do so that I could understand.
Should I get a tutor? Who would he recommend? Should I drop the class and try a lower math class?
No, I didn’t say anything stupid, like the numbers were talking to me. Nowadays I’d have someone’s hide if they treated me that way. I’ve grown much less naive and in awe of so-called authority figures.
But have never gotten over my intense fear of algebra and beyond.
Knowing cups, half cups and teaspoons and the other examples given of “algebra” is NOT the same as trying to figure out those damned charts and graphs with just letters.
Measurements aren’t much more than “basic math” and there is a solid, right in front of you, concrete basis for them. The strange configurations of letters and signs just don’t make sense that way, (for mathphobes) regardless of how “logical” and simple it seems for math whizzes.
I think he wrote 300+ books, and you can find at least one book of his in every classification of the Dewey Decimal System.
I’m tolerably good at math, but admit that the higher mathematical disciplines just couldn’t seem to permeate my brain. (at least, geography and all of that kind of thing)
And here’s something Spoz told me just this morning:
(no, we weren’t talking about statistics class… rather, he thinks that I have way too many statistics and lists inside my head and in the various books I have around here…)
Thought that was pretty funny…
F_X
I find it frightening when the ideas of “I’m not good at math so I’ll stop trying” and “It’s not necessary to be good at math” are put together. It appears that society sees an inability to do math (aside from dyscalcula and the like) as an acceptable and sometimes favorable trait. If a person believes they will do better socially if they don’t appear to be good at math, they may stop trying to do math and start having more difficulty with it.
We could also have a pleasant discussion on social pressure to do poorly at math and how it affects females in particular, but I’ll try to leave that for later. (I bought into the whole “girls shouldn’t be/aren’t good at math” thing when I was in high school, and I still regret it. I’m just about ready to go back to school and go into some scientific/engineering type field, once I figure out which, simply because I sorely miss working with mathematics.)
Postscript to those who say that arithmetic is difficult and brains aren’t structured for that, I cordially thank you for denigrating my abilities. I know that being able to calculate an 18% tip (although really, 20% is more standard, isn’t it?) or add long columns of numbers in my head is just a party trick now that calculators are cheap and easily available, but I am quite offended at the idea that brains are not structured to do such and that arithmetic is less important than the rest of math. I’m so thrilled to know that I spent hours and hours in elementary school learning how to do this well and now it means virtually nothing. Then again, I guess my brain just has a faulty structure since I can do arithmetic mentally.
I don’t think that’s what people are saying at all. The fact that you’re good at arithmetic is really cool, hardly a fault in your brain. However, once you get into higher pure math, arithmetic does fall by the wayside and is replaced by other skills. That’s what at least some posters were saying.
I wasn’t denigrating you, I swear to Euler! No, in fact I greatly admire anyone who can do arithmetic in their head. We really aren’t biololgically hard-wired to do this, and it takes a lot of practice and skill to do mental calculations. In fact, I’m quite envious of my partner’s skills, and not just because I get horribly teasted for being a mathy who can’t add things like 247+682 in my head. Shoot, I wouldn’t be a math major if it wasn’t for my [strikeout]crutch[/strikeout] calculator (and I do know how to work a slide rule but the thing just doesn’t add).
If I can’t even move a decimal one digit left and double the amount, then I really should decline my future sheepskin.
Ah, thanks for the clarifications! Although I wonder now – where in the spectrum of learning mathematics does arithmetic become less important and other skills come into play? (I got spooked after Calculus I.)
I suffered from math trauma from grade 6 to the first year of cegep, mainly because, for some reason (i suspect inertia), I landed in the advanced math class when I arrived at SJR in Grade 6, and never got out of it again no matter how much agony it gave me.
I am decently good at mental arithmetic, quite good at written arithmetic, and I retain a passing acquaintance with trigonometry. But I have forgotten all the calculus I ever learned, and good riddance because it was sheer torture of which I understood nothing. Calculus alone was enough to make me drop the Pure and Applied Sciences program I was in and swap over to Creative Arts (which ended up being English and philosophy, at which I did much better.)
That’s because he was explaining it to LoneRaven, not you, and she clearly didn’t need those little steps.
Again, the target audience was one who does understand this mathematical notation. Why should it be spelled out on the off chance that vaguely interested third parties might not understand the letters?
FWIW, I’ve always thought of maths first and foremost as a language. And that language has an alphabet all of its own. Look at your average undergraduate’s workbook as a lay person and you’ll barely be able to make sense of a single thing - it’s like heiroglyphics if you don’t understand the language.
This is not done, however, to confuse other people. It’s actually done to simplify the mathematical process. Those simple notations are shorthand for some pretty heavy concepts - writing it out in words would turn a one line equation into a page of writing. If we’re to make any headway at all in being able to grasp a problem inside our pathetically small brains we need a way to create patterns out of the chaos.
But to answer your questions in linguistic terms, assuming that those questions were in earnest:
y can be thought of as the object, the thing that we are interested in. For example, the finishing position of a thrown ball.
x is the subject, the thing we can change. For example, how hard we throw that ball.
f is the thing that links the object and the subject - if we throw the ball this hard then it will land in this position.
The brackets are mathematical punctuation, used to make sense of the notation. Otherwise it would be like reading text with no full stops, commas, brackets, hyphens, capital letters etc.
So there you go. Not so hard after all, eh?
pan
pan
Once you get into any of the big modern topics–algebra, analysis, and topology–arithmetic skills become much less important. Don’t get me wrong–there are branches that use arithmetic, like number theory (“higher arithmetic”) and statistics, but they’re in the definite minority.
I’ll attest to basic mental arithmetic falling by the wayside when you get to higher math. Back in my first two years of university (uh, as opposed to the third year I just finished, heh), I was taking Calc and Discrete Math classes, among others, while working part time at a garage.
You have no idea how many looks I got when, after setting aside my Calc homework (which could be anything from basic derivatives to triple integrals to whatever, in that time frame) to take care of a customer’s bill, I’d often need to use a calculator to figure out change if they gave me coins on top of their wad of dollars.
I just graduated from UW-Madison with a math degree. In two weeks, I’ll be in Atlanta, preparing to teach secondary math with Teach For America. Believe me, this issue has gripped me for a long time.
If I had a nickel for anytime somebody said “Oh wow, Math, huh? Well, that’s great, but I’ve never been very good at that whole numbers thing,” I’d be a rich, rich woman. I’ve checked with English major friends, and nobody ever says the equivelant to them. I can’t figure it out. I’m not some sort of alien, just a geek.
I think part of the problem is that people don’t give math the time it deserves. It just takes plain ol’ time and effort to understand these concepts. I was confused by what a function really truly was until my freshman year of college. I think because a lot of us learn to read young, before we can really remember the effort it takes, we think knowledge of math should just magically come to us. It doesn’t. Like learning languages, hell, anything, you’ve got to drill some of this stuff. Also, I’ve found that just letting mathematical ideas stew for a few months, or even years, helps my understanding a lot.
Math didn’t come easy for me either. I’d been coddled all through high school, and when I got to college I was woefully unprepared for higher-level math. But I got there (graduated with a relatively respectable GPA too), and I plan to go to get my PhD in it once I’ve finished teaching. There’s some beautiful stuff in math, and it breaks my heart when people deliberately hide from it.
One of my favorite memories from college … Like a fair number of the Mich. State Honors College students in math/science programs, I worked as a T.A. for the Math Dept. And also like a fair number of the Honors College students, I had multiple majors. The undergraduate TA’s had to share offices-we would coordinate our office hours to minimize conflicts, but it wasn’t unusual to find us in our office at other times, as it was a pretty good place to study. There happened to be three of us in there that day during Todd’s office hour, when one of his freshman Algebra students threw in his hand …
Student: “Ah! I give up! My brain’s just not built for math-I’m a history major!”
Todd: “Well, actually, I’m an English major.” (Todd was double-majoring in English and biochemistry.)
Student: “You are?” [to me] “Is he really an English major?”
Me: “Yes, he is. And I’m a philosophy major.” (I double-majored in physics and philosophy.)
Karen: “And I’m a German major!” (Karen had changed her major from engineering.)
That student probably still wonders why all of those humanities people were teaching math.
My father is a math Ph.D., which meant that I did horribly in math even though I actually have decent aptitude. Once he understood the basic pscychology, he eased up on me a lot and I actually started to enjoy it, especially calculus (which I’ve completely forgotten).
But the key to my enjoyment was good teachers, and my dad has always railed at how poor most math teaching is. Traditionally, it’s just not a skill for which mathematicians were rewarded. Indeed, I recall that elements in my college’s math department did their best to kill off our Math Skills Center, led by a non-Ph.D. who was about the only math person in school who could teach. Only a significant student rebellion saved it (fortunately, since then they’ve made a concerted effort to attract younger faculty who can teach, and who like it).
Interestingly, after I did well in calc my dad admitted that he thought it a waste of time for students who weren’t interested in the sciences. He’d love to see schools offer a rigorous sort of “math appreciation” class, but unfortunately those that exist tend to be rot.
And that leads to the final point. In the modern world, it is astonishingly easy to get by without much math at all. That’s what makes it different from reading, which is still fundamental to everything else (even math books rely on textual descriptions!). Certainly life’s a lot richer, and less risky, with math - but it ain’t essential. So people can safely brag about their innumeracy because, in all likelihood, it won’t have many bad consequences for them.
Sorry if I skipped some stuff. Message boards aren’t the best medium for teaching. If you want to understand it, I’ll be glad to explain it a little better but essentially what loneraven was asking about is stretching a function (which is a fancy math term for a line, whether it is straight or curved:) ). Here’s what I explained to loneraven in another form and if you have any type of graphics program, you can play along.
Take any image. Look at it and see what is exactly in the center vertically. Got that? Okay, now resize the image so that it is still as wide as it used to be but is now twice as tall. Is what was in the center still in the center? Is everything still as wide as it was? Yup. What you have done is “scale” the image in the vertical (y) direction by a factor of 2 (it’s twice as tall).
As for the whole y=f(x) thing, I don’t really have time to go into it right now 'cause I’m at work.
H.
ps. I hated math until I got to Algebra! Still did it, though.