People are generally averse to math. I’ve never quite understood why, but they are. The toughest thing about math to most folks, methinks, is that it requires people to be able to do the same thing over and over again. Even though we humans are creatures of habit, it doesn’t turn out well when numbers are involved.
But the bigger problem? People aren’t quite sure what to do with math. Even a grip of the nerds in high school can take a derivative or perform some other piece of calculus without knowing what those things are for. Which makes the math itself nothing more than a parlor trick.
And sometimes, people get the math right and just do something utterly silly with it. Check this from the AP piece on the differences in prize monies for men and women at Wimbledon.
The All England Club announced Tuesday that the men’s winner this year will receive $1.170 million and the women’s champion $1.117 million, a difference of $53,000. It’s a 4 percent increase in British currency.
So help me out–dollars are British currency now? But as for math, wouldn’t it be a four percent increase in any currency? Numbers add up differently in different countries?
Maybe I don’t know math as well as I thought.
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