Most of the math I do at work is related to compound interest. Of all the math I believe the general public should understand, the concept of how paying interest to others is a total screw would get my top vote.
I have a co-worker who took out a car loan last week at, wait for it, FIFTY THREE PERCENT INTEREST! No concept of what that was costing her. She could only see, “I can afford the monthly payment.”
(1 + r)^n and its friend 1/(1 + r)^n have been the two most important concepts in work and personal life that I’ve ever learned and applied.
That is usury. That cannot be legal? Oh, no, I just checked, wow, usury laws are weak af.
53%?!
Sounds like one of those shitty used car joints “no credit, no problem” that you sign your life away for a mediocre car.
Sounds like predatory lending
I would agree, but it’s not my life, not my money. You can’t really go around telling people they fucked up every time you see it.
How the hell is “average price” useful?
Thats like buying potatoes and pork chops and saying the average price is $8.75. Technically true but practically useless.
YOU’RE DOING QUADRATICS IN MIDDLE SCHOOL?’
Yes, that’s standard at least in Germany
In Spain too, it’s also needed in vocational training (FP1, FP2) for carpenters, electricians, plumbers, etc., because it involves necessary calculations in their work, such as trigonometry, spheronometry, vector forces, flow calculations, among others. For office workers, naturally, percentage calculations are not overcome, but even there second degree equations can arise.
Wow. In America, trades people use a chart to look up literally anything that requires math. If you’re lucky.
Most of the time “it looks good enough” is enough.
I’ve had an economics teacher in the Netherlands who had interest tables and wanted us to them too. For those before calculators, those are tables that list the years on the left, and the interest on top, and then the multiplier in the table.
So, 10 years at 6.5% = 1.877
This was in 2005i sh.
Could you use a slide rule for that kind of multiplication?
I would use an Abacus for multiplication and a Venier scale for accuracy
Same in Brazil, though public education quality varies a lot.
… The worst part is I’m decent with math by US standards in school and couldn’t even solve the middle school one with a quick glance.
Multiply the top by the bottom to erase it. Reverse the square root of something. + Or - threw me right off…
Cause the middle school one is the quadratic formula. You use it to factor 2nd degree polynomials. You don’t solve for a, b, and c, you just plug them in.
That’s nuts. In the US the only high school math I was taught was algebra and geometry. Anything more advanced than that was for students in the “gifted” program. No wonder why Americans are so stupid.
not sure why you’re getting downvoted for this, I had the same experience with my education in the US. high school class of 08, lol. the school never taught a math class past algebra 1. if you finished it, you still needed math credits per year, so they’d just have you retake the same class. seriously. absolutely abysmal. 95% of the math I do now is self taught. from my “education” alone, we never got much past solving basic linear single-variable equations. most of my class graduated barely literate. really, most of my class simply left, myself included - the dropout rate was astonishingly high around 08, and instead of doing the same classes and curriculum for the third time in my senior year, I opted to simply leave, educate myself, and shortly thereafter start my business.
I’m American, I definitely learned this stuff in 7th or 8th grade. Granted, I didn’t use it past high school, and I forgot it before I finished college, but that’s definitely when I learned it.
Bro I’m American and they didn’t even mention algebra until 9th grade, the fuck you mean quadratics in middle school
Math is personalized in American schools. There’s on grade, advanced, gt, and accelerated. Each level above on grade is how many years ahead your class math is. Depending on how large your school is, gt and accelerated math students will take math with the grades above them.
On grade would be quadratic in 9th.
Yeah…I am american and almost done with my associates degree…and I still haven’t learned “quadraitcs” idk, standards are wired
It’s Algebra 2. I just checked and only 6 states require it. Crazy. I was in a state that didn’t require it but finished Calculus 2 at graduation.
Yeah seriously WTF, I didn’t even learn basic Algebra until freshmen year of high school! We never even got to the math with the fancy letters in it. I have no idea what those cursive f, d, and w characters mean.
Cursive big f: “integration”, which can be interpreted in two ways. One is “area under the curve” for some part of the curve. Other is “average value of a part of the curve multiplied by the size of that part of the curve”. Curve being the function, the graph, f(x), however you wanna call it.
Normal d: “differentiation” (from difference), infinitely small change. Usually used in ratios: df/dx means how much does f(x) change relative to x when you change x a little bit.
Cursive d: “partial”, same as normal d but used when working with higher dimensional data like 3D. Can also mean “boundary” of something. Example: boundary of a volume in 3D, like wrapping paper around a box. Or, boundary of such wrapping paper itself, if it’s not perfectly connecting.
Omega: just a Greek letter used as a variable, in this case there’s a history of it being used as a sort of “density” variable in the field of differential geometry. The college row in the meme is kind of translating the high school row from a function to a 3D volume.
I did advanced mathematics and chose physics as one of my elective subjects in school. Nowadays, I do a lot of work based around analytics and forecasting.
“We need to find the average of this.”
“That’s easy. I’ll do some more advanced stuff to really dial in the accuracy.”
“Awesome. What’s the timeframe?”
looks at million row dataset “To find the average? Like a month. Some of these numbers are mispelled words… Why are all these blank?”
“Oh, you’ll have to read this 45 page document that outlines the default values.”
And that’s how roffice maths works. Lots and lots of if conditions, query merges, and meetings with other teams trying to understand why they entered in the thing they entered. By the time the data wrangling phase is complete, you give zero fucks about doing more than supplying the average.
Oh, sorry the 45 page document is for something else. The only person who understands this dataset is Dave and he was made redundant 5 years ago. Anyway, can you get this done today?
If Timmy has 45 pages to read on a bus traveling an average speed of 35 mph with an mean stop distance being 0.7 kms how many stops will Timmy pass before this fucking meeting ends ?
Why do I need to know what Timmy is up to, and how much he is reading?
Yup this is every job now. Wrangling numbers. The actual job or calculation could be done in days if less. But dealing with dirty information and playing detective which isnt even part of it is the sink hole of every job right now.
Lol, I have still written python scripts to deal with them all.
I miss those days…
Is this why chatgpt has a chance at optimizing work? Because it will filter out boring mistakes for you
Until it introduces a bunch of mistakes of its own. AI as a test has failed in several industries before now. It’s been around much longer than you’d think and has been tested in the BG for a lonnng time with much fail to the result of disgust if you even bring it up. It’s nothing more than a novelty in writing that doesn’t require the need to run on tight, non rational numbers. Something of which no binary based, household (and most industry) computer is capable of.
Look up the Ariane 5 rocket disaster. It is the summary of floating point error that can result in disaster. This is the limitation that is present in all standard computers you’d be accessing today since the 1930’s.
(Also referred to as round off errors or truncation errors in avionics because of how common irrational numbers are in spatial navigation.)
What is the advanced stuff you can do if you don’t have garbage data?
That’s a tough question in analytics lol
You mean mathematical examples? Or like examples of analytical outcomes? Keeping in mind the more analytics-heavy, the more it involves lots of sources, patterns, variables, and scenarios, but I could provide just a single example.
Edit: Oh, wait. If you’re referring to just averages… In forecasting I prefer, as a minimum, to do weighted averaging. This is where I’ll have a certain time period of cumulated historical data that provides a more stable base, however more weight is applied the more recent (relevant) the data is. This shows a more realistic average than a single snapshot of data that could be an outlier.
But speaking of outliers, I’d prefer to also apply weight to outlying data points that may skew the output, especially if sample size is low. Like 1, 2, 2, 76, 3, 2. That 76 obviously skews the “average”.
Above that, depending on what’s required, I’ll use a proper method. Like if someone wants to know on average how many trucks they need a day, I’ll utilise Poisson instead to get the number of trucks they need each day to meet service requirements, including acceptable queuing, during the day. Like how the popular Erlang formulas utilise Poisson distribution and can kind of handle 90% of BAU S&D loading in day to day operations with a couple clicks.
That’s a basic example, but as data cleanliness increases, those better steps can be taken. Could be like 25 average last Wed vs. 20 weighted average over last month vs. 16 actually needed if optimised correctly.
Oh, and if there’s data on each truck’s mileage, capacity, availability, traffic density in areas over the day, etc…obbioisly it can be even more optimised. Though I’d only go that far if things were consistent/routine. Script it, automate it, set and forget and have the day’s forecast appear in the warehouse each morning.
And yet such simple things are often incredibly hard to get done because of poor data governance or systems.
We did a lot of straight algebra in highschool, I don’t need the exact skill but its boosted my abstract thinking a lot which helps in other things
Lucky, my school only did gay algebra and look at me now 😩
But have you found x 😁
I was denied a mathematics education, for real. I can’t even do long division, nevermind that squiggly F shit. I thought that stuff was only for astrophysicists.
I want to learn basic maths, but I’m in a ‘learned helplessness’ mindset where I can’t even get through basic sums and equations intended for children (I’m old as fuck now).
I was diagnosed with autism a few years back, which kinda made no sense. I would have expected rainman powers, but numbers just don’t jive with my cunt of a brain. Maths is as inscrutable to me as people’s faces or social cues.
I did an honors math+cs degree. I’m pretty good at advanced math. I never learned long division. Don’t feel bad about that.
(In case any other mathy people read this and wonder how I could understand ring theory without Euclid’s division algorithm, relax)
What’s the college one mean?
It’s the most general form of Stokes’ theorem that the integral of a differential form over the boundary of an volume and the integral of an exterior derivative of this form over that volume are the same. It covers a lot of classic formulas from the fundamental theorem of calculus to Green’s theorem, Gauss’ theorem and classic Stokes’ theorem.
Same as high school but fancier?
Math exam in two days, please send help
Which math?
Multidimensional analysis
Linear algebra (ex: multiply the matrices A and B), multivariable calculus (example: find ∇F with F=[xy,yz,xz]^T ), or actual “multidimensional analysis” (example: define the norm of [1m,1m/s,1m/s^2 ] in a way that makes sense)? I can help with all three.
Yeah Multivariable calculus is the thing. I keep forgetting the name.
Sounds like fun! I’m going to bed soonish but I’m willing to answer questions about multivariable calculus probably when I wake up.
When I took multivariable calculus, the two books that really helped me “get the picture” were Multivariable Calculus with Linear Algebra and Series by Trench and Kolman, and Calculus of Vector Functions by Williamson, Crowell, and Trotter. Both are on LibGen and both are cheap because they’re old books. But their real strength lies in the fact that both books start with basic matrix algebra, and the interplay between calculus and linear algebra is stressed throughout, unlike a lot of the books I looked at (and frankly the class I took) which tried to hide the underlying linear algebra.
Thanks for the offer! The exam is tomorrow (today is another) so there isn’t a lot of time to prepare anymore. I’ll just be writing a page of notes that we can take to the exam as a cheat sheet. Still, if something comes up, I might just ask you.
Thanks for the offer.
The exam is tomorrow (today is another)
Ouch. Been there. Good luck on your exams!
As an actuarie this meme is kinda true but mostly false. I had classes on some advanced maths like ordinary differential equations that have never use on my day to day job. But, the actuarial sciences math in collage was elementary school level of abstraction compared with the real world. There’s still a lot of excel tho, but I’m cool and use python (pandas) wherever I can.
AcTuArIe
This is a tangent but, I dunno why we teach students how to solve ODEs. Computers can do these stuffs perfectly fine. What they can’t do is the actual understanding and analysis.
Disagree. ODF was one of the best subjects I took, and even if I haven’t used it, I could be working on quant where is used regularly. And the same can be said for any other subject.
I see, did your class introduce the principles other than raw formulas? Imo the formulas are not so useful considering that you can look it up, but understanding the meaning they hold is worthwhile.
