What The Heck Is Maths Anyway?

So you might be wondering what the point of all of this is, angles, y's and x's and so on. Well it can seem like a big waste of time to a lot of people, but maybe there's a chance there's a little more to it? Maths has enabled us to put a man on the moon, to build computers that can do trillions of calculations per second, and to build tunnels bridges and skyscrapers all over the planet. Maths can do amazing things, the question I want to help you answer in this article, is how?

The way it does this is actually quite simple, in fact it has to be. You see the world is a very complex place and even doing something as simple as drinking a glass of water in actual fact is a fantastically complicated process. See you have to think the thought to drink, then your brain must send signals through your nerves to activate the muscles, which have to burn energy to work, then you have to co-ordinate the muscles exactly to move the glass in the right direction. And the glass of water by the way has trillions of different molecules, minerals and so on all moving in every direction and there's a whole load of other things going on that I did not mention! Even the things I did mention are complicated enough that you could write a whole book on each one!

But in reality, what do you really need to know about it? The essential facts are, there's a glass of water there and you want to drink it, so you pick it up and drink some. Done. See we have a choice about which information we consider when trying to solve a problem, and what to ignore. This information filter is something you do all the time, probably without even realising it mostly. For example when you're watching TV you're probably trying to filter out your mother telling you to go do your homework! So the more information we include, the more complicated the problem becomes, and the less information you include the simpler it becomes. The easy solution might be then, on the face of it, to ignore as much information as possible. Then the problems become really easy! Well that certainly is true, but it is possible to over simplify things. Like if I just said to you "the secret to doing well in your maths exams is to get a high mark on the exam paper". It is true, but it is lacking enough information to really be useful to anyone. So there is a balancing act between, ignoring enough information to make the problem simple enough to solve, whilst including enough information to make the solution actually relevant to solving the problem. In my mind, Maths strikes an excellent balance between the two, and has therefore become a very valuable tool in solving real world problems. You see what we are trying to do in maths is simplify the real world, and in fact create an imaginary copy of the real world, that is both sufficiently simple to make solving problems possible, and sufficiently complex to still be relevant to the real world. Take the example of landing on the moon. The things that would have been ignored there are things like, what does Niel Armstrong like for breakfast? What's his favourite colour? How many buttons should there be on the control panel? What we include though is the things that are really important, the things that have a big impact on whether or not we get to the moon. So things like, how heavy the space rocket it, which direction it has to go, where the moon is, what gravity does and so on. By looking only at those things, and by understanding the relationships between them, we have a version of the real world which only contains the things we really need to solve the problem we are trying to solve. This is what's called a "model". And it just so happens that this model is good enough to actually solve the problem and put a man on the face of the moon. Incredible.

Well that's it for now, I hope you enjoyed reading this. Next time you're slugging away at some big equation, remember that it's not all in vain!