What Even Is Algebra And Why Should I Care About It?

It is a cool September afternoon; you are 11 in high school and you have just walked into your maths class and sat down and all of a sudden your teacher instead of writing numbers on the board starts writing letters. They then start talking about how x is equal to this, y is equal to that and even more worrying x is somehow equal to y.

What is this witchcraft, maths is about numbers not letters? Get these letters out of my maths!

It s been a few years since you first saw letters in your maths, and you ask someone what is Algebra and why should I care about it? (which I accept is perhaps an unlikely thing to ask someone), you would probably get a non-comital response saying something along the line of letters in maths and because you need it to get good grades .

So what is Algebra? And why should you care about it?

Algebra is all about looking at variables and the relationship between them and then applying rules to these relationship to enable you to draw conclusions about the variables.

What does this mean in practice?

Well say you run a business which makes 2 products with specific demand. These 2 products are made from the same base components at different rates and you want to figure out what combination of these products makes you the most profit.

This type of situation can be written as an algebraic equation and then solved to find the maximum profit.

Why should you care about algebra?

Have you been driven anywhere recently? How do you think the car was designed and tested? You guessed it algebraic equations.

Have you used a computer or phone recently? How do you think they were developed and work? You guessed it algebraic equations

Have you followed Google maps somewhere recently? (Other apps are available). How are these apps able to track your location? I let you guess yes it s through algebraic equations.

How do maps track you with algebraic equations? Well there are formulae which track how long signals take to transfer between your phone and satellites and then triangulating your position based on how long the signal takes to travel between the phone and a number of satellite. Triangles underpin a surprisingly large amount of modern world technology everything from films, to GPS, to architecture and design.

Algebra is all around us, it underpins so much of modern society yet we ignore it, we do not see it because it s hidden within systems that we just use and take for granted. I know I take It for granted when it comes to things like my computer just working or Google Maps knowing my route.

If all we think of Algebra as is those weird letters in maths that I had to figure out while at school and that s it then we miss out on so much of why things work in the modern day, and that is why algebra matters.