I See Math All Around Me!

  If you mention the word "math" around most people, they throw up their hands in the form of a cross, hoping you disappear as if a vampire faced with a cross.  Or they mutter something like "I've never been good at it". Yet they miss the math found everywhere.

Look at the fantastic curves found at the Sydney Opera House.  Curve after curve gracefully standing in beauty.  As you drive towards your destination, you find curves as part of the road or if you head out fishing, you'll see curves as the river twists and turns its way across the landscape.

Most people when they sit down to watch a baseball or basket ball game pay more attention to the players than the ball but both sports utilize are perfect spherical shapes.  Other sports use spherical shapes such as soccer, golf, etc yet some use more of a oval shape such as in football.  If one looks carefully, patterns can be detected in the plays, patterns that remind people of the Pythagorean Theorem.

Oh and roads, roads, roads, are parallel and perpendicular.  Some are set so two parallel roads are crossed by another road which acts as a traversal so instead of seeing a busy intersection, I see so many different angles such as corresponding, alternate interior and exterior or consecutive. They are all there hidden by businesses and people.

How many times have teachers required students to calculate the slope in a purely theoretical basis rather than exploring a real life application on the roads and roofs across the country.  Each has a slope yet the slope is called a grade or pitch yet its the same.

Of course architecture uses so many geometric shapes both two and three dimensional such as cylinders, pyramids, prisms, found in the Leaning Tower of Piza, the Great Pyramid of Giza, or a skyscraper.  Many building exhibit a series of parallel and perpendicular lines in addition to having some beautiful example of zero and undefined slopes.

The more modern architecture often offers striking angles playing against each other in a composition similar to the music at a concert. Furthermore, the skyline of a city resembles a wonderful bar graph with its different heights spread across the horizon.  Every city has a different graph of its skyline.

Of course each map has a special coordinate system with longitude and latitude in degrees pinpointing a location.  Maps of streets use a alpha numeric system to divide the city up into areas so D3 covers several streets.  I remember as child finding maps in the phone book and looking up the street I lived on.  This is before Google maps.

Have you ever gone through a hardware store where each can of paint tells you how many square feet it covers, how large each tile is, or how many square feet the wallpaper covers.  Beautiful numbers combined to discuss area, real area not the theoretical weird shapes you seldom see in your neighborhood.

This is just a short list of math you see everywhere you look.  It doesn't include all the equations used to explain how your air conditioner or heater works, how the business sector determines profit and loss, the Dow Jones index and so much more.  I love the world and all the math swirling through our lives.

Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.