A friend of mine from high school just asked me if I could help her son with his trigonometry. Had to say no because though I made all A’s in that subject back in the day, and went as far as Calculus II in college, that was twenty more than twenty years ago and those skills have all atrophied. I am still comfortable with algebra up to about logarithms (though I’m not sure how useful those are any longer).
Anyway it got to me thinking: what is the highest math you were trained in? What is the most advanced math you do on a regular basis at your job?
A lot. I spend all day writing machine checked proofs in a constructive higher-order logic and I do “real” mathematics with a pen and paper on the side.
I never received any training higher than the basics of quadratic equations and plane geometry. I use binary logic and symbolic logic all the time while working, but those are easy, you only have to count up to one.
The vast majority of people do not have a need to use higher math in any part of their life. But an awful lot of people benefit from the experience of understanding and learning how to use complex methodologies. Really, isn’t a lot of education this way? We get more benefit from studying history by learning how to research, organize, and communicate. We learn chemistry to understand and use the scientific method even though we may never work as chemists. The subject doesn’t have to be directly relevant to any particular aspect of life.
Arguably a lot, though not particularly high-level. I write software, so I’m constantly doing small amounts of arithmetic and logical operations in my head as I’m coding them up.
Occasionally I’ll hit the whiteboard to calculate something out, but I usually don’t have to use anything more complicated than algebra or discrete math. I have to understand algorithmic complexity, but it’s pretty rare that I need to do anything really novel.
I had to help my kid with trig this past semester. Although I don’t use it everyday, luckily, it’s all on the internets now. You could help your friend’s kid by showing him/her what to search for.
None. I’d say “none whatsoever” but, I mean, I calculate tips and figure out how much 15% off is and what have you. I aced the AP Calculus exam in high school and the only thing I remember is that if you take the derivative the graders give you a point so dy/dx that bad boy up.
Well, it depends upon what the OP means, obviously. Doing math as a business executive is different than doing math as a professor on a blackboard which is different than doing math on a piece of paper on a construction site. If the OP is asking how much “grunt work” math do we do, then my answer is “not a helluva lot.”
Am interested in whatever math responders perform. For example I am sure that an electrical engineer has a lot more occasion to do math than a florist but I would like like to know what specific maths the engineer does regularly.
I did well enough in calculus and took math for the physical sciences (although my grade would suggest that I did not, in fact, learn math for the physical sciences). I run regressions and do other sorts of data analysis with my handy-dandy stats software, which means I do plenty of math at work.
I’m sure I’ll be able to help the kids with their trig homework when they get there, but I’m going to have to read up on it first!
At least math in the ‘real world’.