Everything's a Math Problem

There's no real end to math problems.Students in grade school often have no concept of what math really is about when they're doing addition and subtraction.  Additionally, when youre studying elementary-level math, its sometimes hard to make the connection between seemingly-insignificant math problems and the ultimate power that math has to solve problems in real life.

Take the subject of public health. The same people who, as children, labored over long division and quadratic equations, have eventually used the building blocks of those elementary math problems to help eliminate major diseases such as the mumps and rubella.  By turning health problems into math problems, collecting data and turning it into numbers, public health workers and epidemiologists figured out what was causing these diseases.  Then, they solved the math problems and figured out how to get rid of the diseases.  Without the elementary building blocks of addition, subtraction, algebra, geometry, calculus, and statistics, this could not have happened.  Mastery of finding solutions to math problemsallowed scientists to solve health threatsand relieve human suffering. They can then analyze the effect of various solutions to those problems with controlled trials.  All of this would not be possible without math.

When university students are undergraduates, they get a lot of irritating and boring math problems to solve, like figuring out how much money Jene would have to save a week if she makes $2000 a month and wants to buy a new car costing $27500 at the end of the year.  If you study social science, youll do research using math.  When they get to graduate school, the statistical part of the math problems is often done with SPSS.  Even so, the understanding of the concepts and ways to use the data has to be with the student so that she or he knows what program and methods to use.

Heres another example; home improvement.  If you want to repaint one or several walls, you have to figure out many issues. Though this may seem pretty simple, you still have to know how to add, multiply, divide, subtract, and do basic algebra. Its for this reason that everyone in the United States is required to achieve at least a basic competency in math.  People who study education are aware that all aspects of our daily lives involve math in many ways.

When we think of solving math problems, the idea makes many of us cringe. We think of the word "problem" as something we want to get rid of.  We should perhaps instead use the word puzzle.  Isn't that more inviting? Math puzzles would be something fun, playful, or exciting.While calling them math problems makes them sound bad, calling them math puzzles makes you feel that you're accomplishing something if you put the puzzle together. Thats really more accurate as to what math is all about anyway.  In math, we are given a question, such as how much, when, how long, to what degree, etc.  That is the mystery part and provides the frame for the puzzle.  We have some information, such as the car goes at such and such a speed and the distance is so many miles.  That's the information that we have to put together with the concepts.  We can put the concepts together with the information and that's how we complete the puzzle. This is what math problems really are.