And that’s just the beginning. Math increases not only our ability to enjoy culture, but our capacity to perceive the world as it really is. Every day people are fooled by lies. A little bit of math is enough to dispel most of these lies and expose them for the frauds that they are. One example is the movement for zero population growth. We often hear that the world is fast becoming too crowded, that we will soon exhaust our natural resources, and that no family should have more than one or two children. However, what we hear is not necessarily true. By using math, and no other method, Rick and Jan Hess, authors of A Full Quiver, calculated the following tidbits: if you divided the entire population of the world into families of four, and then gave each family of four a four thousand square foot home, all of these homes would cover only the area of Nebraska, Kansas, and a nine-mile wide strip out of South Dakota. This leaves 99.7 million square miles of the world’s land area free of population. Even with food and materials production, stores, and universities, the world is in no danger of filling up. The things you can discover with a little bit of mathematical knowledge are probably uncountable – you can calculate how many raisins it would take to fill the Grand canyon, how many rolls of toilet paper the average American household uses each year, and calculate the weight that one evangelist carries with God. (One billigram, obviously). When Archimedes himself perceived the answer to his dilemma while sitting in the bathtub, it was math that helped him do it. To really understand the world, you need to use math.
Not only does math enable us to better understand the world, it also allows us to use our resources efficiently. Some of math’s greatest contributions to the world, cars and appliances, have been in the area of efficiency. Another way that math saves time is by route finding. In the German town of Konigsberg, there is a river that used to be spanned by seven bridges. The people of the town used to spend afternoons walking across the bridges, trying to cross them all and end up at the same starting point without crossing the same bridge twice. Obviously, television hadn’t been invented yet. According to the book Why Do Buses Come in Threes? by Rob Eastaway and Jeremy Wiyndham, it was the great mathematician Euler who solved the puzzle that occupied the people of Konigsberg for years. He made a mathematical diagram of the topography of the Konigsberg bridges on paper, and discovered that it was impossible to cross the bridges only once and end up the same starting point. Because three of the bridges had three roads protruding from them (as opposed to one or two), the poor Germans had been wasting their afternoons for years. Despite the disappointment to the tourist industry of Konigsberg, Euler’s method has become vital to the modern practice of route finding. Postal workers and taxi drivers can cut their usage of gas by up to fifty percent by implementing Euler’s discovery. Mathematical techniques like these smooth our daily live so much, that many people don’t even think about how we would have to function without it. The amazing efficiency of mathematics helps us when driving, cooking, and washing clothes, and it does these tasks so seamlessly that we sometimes take it for granted.
Culture, perception, and efficiency are three of the myriad of skills that mathematical knowledge imparts. They are three of the reasons why math is something that everyone should learn and appreciate. One of the unsung and abused heroes of the last one hundred years, math deserves to be studied and loved. Archimedes’ love for mathematics got a little bit carried away; he died when the Romans took over his city and he asked to be able to finish a math problem before being led into captivity. The Romans didn’t take kindly to his request. I hope that none of us will ever have to die for mathematics, but I also hope that we won’t adhere to the other extreme – mathematical phobia. We live in a universe governed my mathematical rules, and we can’t ignore them without losing some of the richness and flavor we might otherwise have had. Scientist Galileo expressed the sentiment perfectly when he said, “Mathematics is the alphabet with which God has written the universe.” Reading the mysteries of the universe is just as important as reading the literature written by men.
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