Davies’ Dailies - Mister Math Skills

Thank you Flimsy Sanity for introducing me to Dolly Freed’s 1978 Possum living: How to live well without a job and with almost no money!

Although I’m new to Flimsy’s blog and must confess I haven’t read Dolly’s book, I happen to be one of those 70’s schoolboys who still does remember the pain of having to abandon arithmetic (and math skills grooming!) for “… new math, where you learn all about “sets” and graduate not knowing how to balance a checkbook”. That alone might make it worth putting this book on your “must read” list. But believe me, if you have a few spare moments left, just go and read Flimsy’s novelized life story at Bee Dancer of Nokota, with more on her background at Schizophrenia Sourcebook.

Amazing how such gifted people may go unnoticed sometimes…

We still have a few minutes left, which leaves me ample time to share one of Charles Davies’ views on math skills development with you:

“The mere practical man regards with favor only the results of science, deeming the reasonings through which these results are arrived at, quite superfluous. Such should remember that the mind requires instruments as well as the hands, and that it should be equally trained in their combinations and uses. Such is, indeed, now the complication of human affairs, that to do one thing well, it is necessary to know the properties and relations of many things. Every thing, whether existing in the abstract or in the material world; whether an element of knowledge or a rule of art, has its connections and its law: to understand these connections and that law, is to know the thing. When the principle is clearly apprehended, the practice is easy.”

Charles Davies, in The Logic and Utility of Mathematics
pp. 16-17, A.S Barnes & Burr Ed., New York, 1860

“Math is everywhere and yet, we may not recognize it because it doesn’t look like the math we did in school. Math in the world around us sometimes seems invisible. But math is present in our world all the time — in the workplace, in our homes, and in life in general.

You may be asking yourself, “How is math everywhere in my life? I’m not an engineer or an accountant or a computer expert” Math is in your life from the time you wake until the time you go to sleep. You are using math each time you set your alarm, buy groceries, mix a baby’s formula, keep score or time at an athletic event, wallpaper a room, decide what type of tennis shoe to buy, or wrap a present. Have you ever asked yourself, “Did I get the correct change?” or “Do I have enough gasoline to drive 20 miles?” or “Do I have enough juice to fill all my children’s thermoses for lunch?” or “Do I have enough bread for the week?” Math is all this and much, much more.”

Patsy F. Kanter, in Helping your Child Learn Math

This website will be dedicated to providing news and information on the way people use maths on a daily basis in a fun and sometimes useful manner, and cover the topics of essential math skills, arithmetic tips, unexpected math uses and helpful math tools. The audience will consist of any and all human being who has demonstrated even a remotely vague interest in grooming his math skills. While I will be adding posts every day about what I call “gems of math wisdom”, I do expect others to join me on this journey. I am doing this not only because I want to bring math literacy to the rest of us, but also because I want to organize the world’s math information and make it easily accessible.