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Comment by nicbou | Hacker News Reader

To be fair no one ever takes a moment to show you what the math is useful for. You're just expected to learn it because it's said to be important.

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Word. I got taught matrix multiplication in high school without any context. "Here's a grid of numbers kid. Go do some elementary school arithmetic on all of them. No it's not Sudoku I promise".

If only I'd know how important matrix multiplication would turn out to be...

Funny thing is you can use Linear Algebra to solve Sudoku puzzles.

I'm not sure why this is down-voted. Nearly every single teacher I had from elementary though high school, when asked what was the usefulness of the math lesson, said that we would need it when we got to the next level of education. Elementary teachers said we would need it in middle school. Middle school teachers said we would need it in high school. High school teachers said we would need it in college. By college you learned to stop asking questions.

I'm lucky I enjoyed math and science, but I'm not surprised that people who don't enjoy it think it isn't going to be useful to them. It's very much one of the things that if you don't know how to apply it, you won't find the places to apply it, so you end up thinking it has no use.

I think the GP post might have been downvoted because "what the math is useful for" frames it in the wrong way, making it sound like every lesson needs to be immediately applicable to your everyday life. An honest answer might be "this lesson in fractions is one step on a difficult 15-year journey that culminates in a junior developer position at OpenAI," but most 10-year-olds aren't ready for that conversation, so "just trust me, bro" might be the best we can do at that point.

That doesn't sound like it's framed in the wrong way. It sounds like people don't have a good answer for it, get frustrated, and fall back on a "because I said so" answer.

The math I was taught had a lot of practical applications. Fractions for cooking, calculating tips, finance, taxes, etc. Not even that was justified to us, let alone the more advanced stuff.

My recollections of finding math & physics interesting were simply a reflection of finding the world as a whole interesting - it (the world) was obviously full of stuff, stuff that had dimensions & mass & quantities and it seemed very clear that being able to relate such figures to each other would be always be very useful.

Percentages and arithmetic in daily life, programming, financial bookkeeping...to be fair, the math I use often is pretty basic, but even so, the report from UCSD seems to be saying that a significant fraction of the remedial math students can't even perform at that level.

Other math I use rarely, but I'm still glad I learned, say, geometry or calculus when a situation pops up.

Completely fair point. If I knew the importance of buying a house and how in reach it's always been for me with FHA loans, perhaps I would have taken budgeting classes more seriously. If I knew about the option of putting in some sweat equity for a new DIY kitchen countertop in that house I'd eventually come to buy, perhaps I would have paid more attention to the Pythagorean theorem to know how to cut the corner-piece. So on, and so forth.

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