Enjoying Mathematics

This book was written for those who don’t know mathematics. And those who don’t know math maybe don’t know what they’re missing, either. More than that, enjoying math, just like enjoying good music, literature, architecture or biology, to name just a few subjects, is part of a good education. A good education not in a sense of morality, but in the sense that it allows for a more pleasurable life.

A lot of people ask the question: so, what is math good for? All those formulas and theorems which we’ll never use… Well, delve deep enough into any subject and you will find math.

Even in modern day we still don’t see math clearly. It is in almost anything, albeit hidden. It’s been used in designing the brakes in your automobile and the screen on your television, in developing the flu vaccine, in determining global warming levels and your credit card’s interest rate. However, it is true that few people do the math that’s involved in those procedures; there’s only a few engineers and scientists, and it’s not very likely that you, or any of your children, will follow such a specialised career.

But that is rapidly changing. Do you know what are the most promising fields for the next generations? An American study has shown that, among science-related areas, they are:

Medical Robotics

Bioinformatics

Biomedic/Stem Cells Engineering

Pattern Recognition

Nanotechnology

Simulation Engineering

Energy Source Engineering

Aerospace Engineering

Geophysics

Ecology and Sustainability

Computing & Software Engineering

Do you know which of these areas use math extensively? All of them. Over the next years, mathematics will be a much more important and much more visible science than it is today.