Quote:
Originally Posted by Ara T.
Algebra II is as far as I will find math to be useful  I had a terrible time with Pre-Calculus. That's as far as I got in high school. I never found rate of change to be very hard of a concept though.. |
One of the greatest failings of our education system in general is failing to help students understand why math is useful.
I use algebra on a regular basis. Trigonometry has been very handy in construction, stairs and roofs primarily, and gives me a leg up on some of my more experienced brehtren, not in a competitive way, but just as a means of making myself valuable to the job.
Trig was useful when I used to make musical instruments as you often have a limited supply of some rare wood to make the neck out of and you need to cut it in just the right place when you're making the angled cut to get the headpiece from the neckstock.
Calculus is less useful for the average person but it can sorta be like weight lifting for the mind. Knowing how it works can help to understand how scientists might use it.
I did a fun project in one of my computer classes in college where I wrote a program to find the zero roots for complex polynomials of up to x to the tenth power using Newton's method, as in Isaac Newton, the co-inventor/discoverer of calculus along with Leibnitz (some controversy on that point). Absolutely of no use to me but it was fun when it worked. A complex polynomial might be 12 x cubed minus 4 x squared plus 121 x minus 571. A zero root is a number when plugged in to that which will yield a value of zero, or within a specified number of decimal places close to zero as in .000001.