A:
I think I get your concern. You don’t see it’s useful don’t you?
Well, I’m not being critical or anything. It’s a common sight that I see my peers and students younger than me not seeing that maths can do anything to their life. They go on to love other subjects which are actually relevant to their life such as business, or biology, chemistry.
Imagine maths as your loner friend sitting in a party of other subjects i.e other “friends” who are actually more interesting / appealing because they get people’s attention right away with how they strike that sweet spot in a person—the fact that people see them at work in real life.
Studying business management is relevant because you learn about: how to organize your company, make negotiations, do bargains, theories about employee satisfaction and productivity, and so much more. You see a bunch of companies on the street and fancy how it runs, and how you will build an empire of your own, generating money and achieving fame and success and something you can much later tell your grandchildren about, which facilitates you towards learning this subject. Mr Business then gets a lot of people following him.
This can be portrayed as polar opposite to maths, because lots of maths teachers have failed to explain the real life relevance of the subject, and so much students find the class boring and irrelevant. How can a bunch of equations I learn in Algebra 1 gonna give me money? I literally just move my 𝑥’s around.
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Or can it?
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Have you heard of the phrase “Math is the language of the universe”? I bet you had. If you haven’t, then you just have :)
Plus I bet your teacher didn’t tell you this phrase, or that you wandered off because he/she did but after a bunch of useless algebraic equations that got you so sick you shut your ears seconds after.
Now here’s why I think learning mathematics is so useful:
Refer to the bold, italic phrase above :)
Mathematicians are joked to not be in the mainstream of attention and to be very nerdy and goofy as they are, but actually, they’re the backstage people who ensures everything in this world goes well. They have one of the most useful analytical tool: maths.
The closest application of maths to the real world, hands-down, is in the field of engineering. Every branch of engineering uses maths, regardless if you think it might not, such as biomedical engineering. You make a heck lot decent salary being a petroleum engineer, and it was reported that petrol engineers make $150,000 per year on average, which is very high compared to some other jobs, and is one of the highest paying ones. In this branch you deal with fuel, and also with studying how to mine fuels, which requires physics, and that is where you get the maths from.
Back to the famous Mr Business dude. Finance is pretty easy to see here, because it’s the practice of organizing money and locating assets to where appropriate, and money is in numbers, and so finance uses quite some maths. However, there has been a prospective field that is quantitative/mathematical finance and it has been my favorite field of study so far. With an MSc in Mathematical Finance, you go and work in trading firms, in which you trade stocks and try to get profits. Now, you see how your lovely Litecoin behaved?
Welp, not so deterministic is it?
But, these “quants”—the people who are experts in the field—have complicated computer algorithms and programs they build to predict the next 20-days of the price or so. They also use stochastic calculus to model the stock price, which is using a form of calculus you probably learned with the derivative and stuff, but applied to these wiggly stock behaviors. The average salary has been reported to be around $120,000 to $500,000 and you get compensations in the hundred thousands from your boss if you get profit for the firm. Welp, it’s deserved though, because you made that money after all.
Above is Ito’s Lemma. It’s basically the chain rule in stochastic calculus. In ‘normal’ calculus, your chain rule is rather quite simple.
But in stochastic processes, your function isn’t that smooth, so there are some fundamental properties changed, which changed the whole course of applying calculus to these stock movements.
These are just two examples I gave of the mathematics application into real world. After all, the quietest dude in the party of the fields and subjects, are often the most vibrant. Subjects like computational biology derives algorithms from computational mathematics to obtain signals of incoming diseases. In criminology, mathematical models are developed to create a field of probabilities indicating the likelihood of catching a criminal in a particular spot in an area, given datas on where they committed crimes in it. Guess what, it was successful in catching a serial rapist. See this excellent video made by MajorPrep.
All in all, the reason why I and many others learn maths is because it’s just so useful.
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