I am sure many of us have wondered at some point: why do we all have to study mathematics when most of us never use it in our daily lives? Or, who really uses calculus in their life? Isn’t basic arithmetic more than enough for most people?
I’m sure many of you have either thought about this or at least said it casually in conversation.
In this article, I want to present a perspective that might make you feel that the time you spent studying mathematics was not wasted at all. In fact, you may be using it far more often than you realise.
Think of the dinosaur game on Google Chrome, the one many of us have played when the internet stops working.
Imagine you are playing that game. But unlike the dinosaur, you have more resources: a brain that can think and energy that is limited. Your goal is to score the highest points by dodging birds and jumping over stones.
As you play, you notice something interesting: not every stone is the same size. Some are small, some are large. Soon you realise that jumping the same height for every obstacle is inefficient. Instead, you can adjust your jump depending on the size of the stone. This small insight allows you to save energy and survive longer in the game.
Now suppose the terrain itself keeps changing. Sometimes it is mushy, requiring more energy to jump, and sometimes it is firm and bouncy, where you don’t need to jump as much. Suddenly, there is another variable that affects your strategy.
After playing a few games, you gather enough experience to understand what the best action is for different combinations of stone sizes and terrain types.
Now imagine you want to teach this game to your child. You want to pass on all the strategies you learned through your attempts. But what do you actually have? Just scattered data points from your own experiences.
Telling the child things like “jump two feet for a 1.8 foot stone and one foot for a 0.9 foot stone” is inefficient. It’s a long list of examples rather than a clear rule which the kid can follow.
Now what you really need is a language that communicates information efficiently. Instead of listing many examples, you could simply say something like: “Jump about 10% higher than the size of the stone on normal terrain.” One simple rule replaces dozens of individual instructions.
That language is mathematics.
Mathematics allows us to compress large amounts of observations into clear, precise relationships.
In physics, mathematics becomes the language that allows us to communicate the laws of nature to the next generation without passing on every single data point that led to the discovery.
The calculus that once felt useless in school can explain everyday phenomena, like why water in a swimming pool evaporates even though it never reaches its boiling point.
Mathematics is fundamentally a language.
You may not need English to communicate with every human being. But you still need some common language to exchange ideas. Learning English is not useless just because you do not use it with everyone you meet. But it becomes invaluable the moment you encounter someone who only understands English. Mathematics works in a similar way.
You might not use everything you learned every day. But there will be moments when you can understand or communicate an idea more efficiently simply because both of you know the language of mathematics.
And in those moments, you will realise that learning mathematics was never a waste of time.
Nice observation & explanation