You designed a new beautiful car - a cube 3 m by 3 because, why not? Very modern, has plenty of space. You can even install solar panels at the top to charge its batteries.

Now tell me, without differential equations: * how it deforms at impact? * how much more or less air resistance it has and how it depends on speed? * how quickly solar panels can charge the battery given that charging speed is non-linear?

So you’ll end up building countless prototypes and crash them, run at different speeds and charge with different panels and battery types. 100 years later you find out that its shape is just not good.

In the meantime solving few simple differential equations and optimization problems would tell you the same.

Or something very close to programming. How do you add two empirically measured probability distributions describing how two teams perform?

1. A lot of math crops up in unexpected ways in everyday life. Trig in construction & wood working, calculus & integration when doing finance, &c.

2. It's not about teaching how to crunch numbers, it's also teaching general problem solving, and using tools to break down complex problems using your various tools to solve it. This translates directly to everyday life.

As a programmer we use calculus and integration all the time in performance testing and stats when we aggregate the data and pull insights. I have started getting into making canopies for events and I have todo a lot of trig to calculate the dimensions of the shapes before I send them to the printer. Hell I even use lots of my high school physics when I go to calculate the load to choose to right type of rope or metal wire and to determine if anchoring points are safe or not. We also use a lot math when calculating generator loads and building power grids for raves & festivals. I also do aerial circus and we use lots of physics when setting up rigging points and determining safety margins. Hell just having a basic physics understanding is really important to figure out if the carabiner you're using is going to kill you or not.

So yea math is really fucking important, and you do use it everyday even if it's just the problem solving it teaches.

> A lot of math crops up in unexpected ways in everyday life.

Planning a route through an amusement park or mall to reach the most things in the least time...

There's a lot we don't need mathematical perfection on so it never registers as math, but improved intuition can unconsciously help in completely unexpected ways. Like an understanding of latency for why a line at a convention was set up badly.

From what I understand, 'rave' was a late 1980s to early 1990s phenomenon. It was a time when everyone had an excellent time, high on drugs. Nobody was 'calculating generator loads and building power grids' even if you had 14kW of sound system to plug in, monitor speakers and some lights obtained for the weekend from the local theatre.

Electrical items would be plugged in with a slight risk of electrocution or fire, possibly in a pig's shed, in the pouring rain and in the dark. But this was not a worry since the show had to go on and there was the danger of the police turning up in force, with the legal right to steal the whole sound system, which could be big enough to require a semi truck to get it places.

Either the setup worked or it didn't. There was nobody doing advanced maths to get it working, and yes, there would always be a setup problem or two, which happens with kit that is made to work hard. The far more useful skills were the soft skills, so teamwork and coordination, not maths.

In time the rave scene was commercialised to the festival nonsense we have today. A proper rave was a full-on temporary autonomous zone where you could have small children trying to sell you acid tabs or ecstacy. Everything about it was illegal and nobody was sober.

Moving on to festivals and organised mandatory fun events, you have to have an entrance fee, the guys providing the music have to be paid, there has to be a small army of people in high visibility 'security' jackets and you certainly don't have small children trying to sell anyone any drugs.

In this secondary 'professional' context, where the goal is to make money not give people the best party they have ever been to, you really do have to 'calculate generator loads and build power grids' or else you won't get the venue, insurance or the event happening.

Clearly the free party scene is not what it was. Kids today have their five hundred social media friends so they don't need to socialise in real life. However, there was a time, not so long ago, when it all came together wonderfully, with the rave scene, and, part and parcel of that was the complete lack of professionalism. There was fun in taking your life into your own hands.

The aerial circus sounds fun (as does the canopy making). However, across all of the extreme sports where some acrobatics is needed, nobody is doing maths. Engineers behind the scenes, maybe, but the performers? It is all about dedication and practice. To take a relatively modern 'sport', parkour. That dangerous jump from building A to building B, that is done by eye, gut feeling and intuition, after lots of experience doing other jumps. No parkour person is going to whip out the old slide rule to work out the parameters of such a jump.

You mention the carabiner, which is a mountaineering gadget. Again, nobody doing mountaineering is doing fancy maths to select the right carabiner for the job. It comes down to intuition again, and what you and your climbing partner have fielded for the day.

Regarding finance, maths is allegedly useful, but how many bookkeepers are doing any maths beyond addition, subtraction and calculating percentages, mostly for tax paying purposes? In America, where everything is financially engineered and the economy is all about debt payments, maybe more maths is needed for the average citizen, but those hundreds of millions struggling to make their car payments just need a living wage, not added maths skills.

I will stop shouting at the clouds now, however, have you done any of your canopy designs in Blender with the cardboard box plugin that enables you to unwrap a 3D shape into 2D flat surfaces? If that is a no, then give it a go and see if it works for your projects. Note that it enables you to do a render that the client can approve before printing happens.

> How much mathematics is needed anyway? In the day job, how many people have to use maths skills beyond arithmetic?

A lot. It's also pretty funny that your examples of useless math are 3 of the most concrete and directly applicable concepts in the entire set of human knowledge. Try, idk, ergodic Ramsey Theory next time.

> What about trigonometry?

Ever heard about FM radio? Or anything that takes a Fourier series? Anything using complex numbers? Game programming? Graphics? Positional encodings in large language models?

> Differential equations?

My brother in christ, literally Newton's second law.

> Integration and calculus?

Ever needed to numerically find the minimum of a function or solve an equation? Newton-Raphson? Literally all of machine learning?

The thing with math is that if you aren't familiar with the concepts then you don't know what you don't know.

I think you are just proving my point. As an example, FM radio. You and I know how that works, and, I reckon that just the two of us could build out our own station and hand-soldered receivers, even making it stereo. Personally though, I would hope that we would go straight to a DAB-style radio with a few data layers for weather, the schedule and whatnot.

However, from what I understand, the only people listening to FM radio are car-dependent commuters and people that have a trade, whether that be building, hospitality and so on. They all know how to find their favourite radio station and get the volume to a level that they can hear. What percentage of these people know how the radio works beyond that? Or are we talking rounding errors here?

As for LLM things, the hundreds of millions that have ChatGPT installed do not need to know any maths whatsoever. They just write prompts. There are some outliers, such as students trying to cheat on their science projects, maybe they should put down ChatGPT and pick up a textbook, but none of them need to know about 'positional encodings in large language models'. They just don't want any of that, the goal is not to do any 'system two' thinking.

This does not mean that a very small amount of programmers need to know such things, but the vast majority of people have better things to bother themselves with.

Game programming, it is the same again. Millions or even billions might spend their lives in front of consoles, but the people writing the games are relatively few in number, and when you take away the people making textures, running tests and whatnot, an even smaller number of people need to know the tricky maths.

I am not sure whether you were just trolling me or not. Where I live, most people have jobs where they definitely don't need to know anything more than basic arithmetic.

A truly epic weird take.

My weird take is this: calculus and other sorts of advanced mathematics are cultural artifacts as much as they are tools and people should be exposed to them more or less for the same reasons that we are exposed to Shakespeare or the history of world religions: they are beautiful, and learning them changes us in positive ways.

One thing I've learned after most of a lifetime being smart is that being smart barely matters. It doesn't matter whether people are good at math or bad at it or smart. Most people never achieve fluency in most subjects. But children deserve to be taught math as a matter of basic dignity and eudemonia. The attitude that education is a pragmatic thing meant to achieve some end other than enrichment of the person is why the US is so fucked.

Your weird take has made me think again.

The thing was that I went to a school where I was one of the lucky few to be in the top set for maths. We had a deal with our teacher where he could leave us unattended and we would collaborate amongst ourselves to get all of our assignments done. He would just pop by at the end of the week to see how we all got on and to set the next assignment. Only on rare occasions would he have to actively teach us.

Our class was calm and we brought in home computers (as it was then), board games and cards. We would be betting our lunch money on games of Bridge, since that was (weirdly) the hot game to play. We all passed with A's.

All of the other classes had maximal supervision, maximal homework, additional 'special needs' classes and utter carnage, should the teacher leave the class unattended for a femtosecond. They were taught properly, but none of them were any good at maths and none of them went on to do anything that paid the big bucks.

Arguably, when it came to arithmetic, due to the low-key gambling and games playing, everyone in the top set had an edge over everyone else. They were merely learning by rote. We were learning in a collective self-directed way within a culture of learning that we very much developed by ourselves. We also learned how to collaborate to solve problems, which conventional education considers to be cheating. Our 'client' was the teacher, and we needed to keep him sweet as we didn't want to lose our privileges. So that was the motivation, not the usual nonsense about how you will never get a job unless blah blah'.

Hence, I have another truly epic weird take. With art we also teach the history of art as a separate subject. So why not have 'the history of maths' as a separate subject?

Imagine learning about what was discovered in antiquity, before people had calculators, slide rules, even pens and paper. Why did that Persian mathematician need to devise tools for doing clever things with numbers 2500 years ago? What are these tools useful for in today's world? How do you code up a script to implement such tools to save on the mental arithmetic?

Such an approach could get nearer to your truly weird epic take. We would be introducing the wonders of maths to kids in such a way that they would be learning a little bit about ancient civilisations as well as the applications in the modern context.

You don't work in production, engineering, or finance, do you?

You clearly are not a multi-drop delivery driver, a chef, a customer service advisor, a nurse, a sales assistant or a barman.

As it happens, I was working in production AND engineering AND finance all at the same time. I will leave you to guess what roles are in the middle of that Venn Diagram, however, that was a while ago when one of my clients was Lehman Brothers. I had deliberately tried to avoid working in the city, so I was reluctant to work with them, however, they hired my intern for mega bucks. That didn't last long though, as we all know! Ah, the shame...

It is precisely because I do the technical roles that others are scared of that I know most people don't need to know maths beyond basic arithmetic.

One huge advantage of this is that I never treat the maths illiterate with condescension. Unlike some I don't sneer at those that are just trying to get by in life or those that have found there is more to life than maths. Condescension is just plain ugly and there is no need for it.