Why One Should Never Hate Mathematics?
This is the first part of the series in which we dive deep into the world of mathematics and understand how it supports our civilization.
I know how much suffering mathematics has caused in most people’s lives. Moreover I could understand why people hate mathematics even though it plays a very important role in everyone’s life both directly as well as indirectly. But none of those blessings would match the childhood traumas caused as a result of learning mathematics. Yes, I’m trying to be a little bit dramatic here. Anyways, mathematics wasn’t my favorite subject either until ninth standard. But from tenth onwards two things changed, the first one being the change in my perception about mathematics. Obviously, the second one would be that my interest in it started increasing which many of you have correctly guessed. Enough of the backstories, let’s get into business.
Definition
There are a number of definitions which could be used to define mathematics but I would like to give you a different one. It’s nothing but ‘Mathematics is a complex language with capabilities to treat the incoming information in a wide variety of ways’. So, what makes it different from other languages? The ability to handle large amounts of information in a much more systematic and easy manner. Let’s make it much more clear.
“Mathematics is a complex language with capabilities to treat the incoming information in a wide variety of ways”
What makes it Different?
Thousands of years ago humans required only a few sounds or actions to communicate with each other. But with the passage of time the need for more complex languages with capabilities to handle much larger amounts of information became necessary. As a result languages similar to the ones we speak like English, German, Hindi etc. came into being. But the ever increasing amount of information required newer methods to handle it in a multitude of ways to make it useful. For example we could easily analyze the information of different members of our family by giving different names to each one. But how would we quantify the different students in a school or a city? I don’t think anyone could remember the names of each and everyone in a city. To give you an idea, consider the population of New York city. It’s almost 20.1 million and do you still think anyone could remember all those names and details of each person. We could classify the population as men, women, children etc. Still a superior form of language was required to convey this information or to make it much more useful. That’s exactly where the importance of numbers comes up.
“Arithmetic is an important area of mathematics which consists of the study of different operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division on numbers. It also includes other advanced operations like exponentiation, extraction of roots etc.”
Even though we have limited brain capabilities, we are able to analyze the demography of a city or country as well as enable the very existence of such large cities with the help of mathematics. None of the cities which were present thousands of years ago had the size of New York but, the superior flexibility of numbers in handling information enabled the development of these cities which we boast. We are able to estimate the amount of food as well as the quantity of water required by the population in the cities. Not just the cities, the backbone of our civilization called banks is created with the help of mathematics. More about it in the next post.
(To be continued…)
This is the first post of the series which explains the obvious but hidden wonders of mathematics. Feel free to follow to get new insights about mathematics.
