Contrary to what formal education has led us to believe, mathematics was not invented to make our lives harder.

However, it is unfortunate that the teaching methods employed by our school and university teachers tend to portray mathematics as this complex, torturous subject without any real-world use. 

Have you ever pondered in the middle of a math class, the reasons for solving for dy/dx, or why we must engage in this never-ending ultimate search for X? 

Well, I have. Lots of times in fact.  

It was only recently that I found out the answer to these questions. 

Math exists to make things simpler for us. 

Sounds unbelievable right? 

But it is true. All those complicated, mind-numbing theorems were created to make sense of our environment, help us understand and manipulate them for our benefit. 

To put this claim in context and help you relate to it, I will give you some examples. 

Say you have a poultry with a fair number of birds. And you let these birds roam the entire neighborhood free range style until evening when they are expected to return back to their enclosure. 

Without the concept of numbers, how would you be able to keep track of these birds and discover when a few of them are missing or stolen? 

In case you do not relate with the above example, here are couple others.

You made an absolutely delicious cake at your workplace last week where you are the chief baker, but since then you haven’t been able to replicate that same taste and texture. Mathematical measurements were developed to ensure that processes like this can be replicated to get the exact same results. 

What if you want to increase the amount of cake to serve a large party of sixty guests? 

The principle of ratios comes to the rescue and helps you scale up the measurement of ingredients to meet the required need. 

What about money?  

No one jokes around with that because of how important it is to sustain a living. 

And I am happy to say that math made the concept of money possible by helping us equate the value of different items using quantity. 

That way, we are able to attach and demand a certain amount of monetary value for our product or service. We can keep track of how much we have loaned another and how much interest to add based on agreed terms using the percentages. 

The problem with the math education system is that math is not presented as a real-world problem-solving skill as it should be. 

We are taught theorems, but we are not taught why and when we need to apply them. 

This leads to underappreciation for the discipline and a lack of connection to thesubject. Letting students know about the problem to be solved before teaching themthe solution helps to develop a deep intuitive understanding of the conceptsand enough interest to find the solution no matter how complex it might appear. 

In my role as an AI Research Engineer, I have come across numerous situations that have helped me appreciate the mathematical concepts I learned while I wasyounger. However, I noticed that my math foundation is not as strong as I need it tobe. 

So, I decided to learn math again from scratch and share my learning journey with you. 

The idea is to learn math differently, using the problem and solution approach with each concept relating to a real-world situation or problems in combination with solving exercises using numbers and operations to develop a sharp mathematical sense which is very important for pattern recognition and creativity.

While most textbooks and learning materials focus only on math theorems and proofs, there are a few resources that use exciting approaches to help students learn math. I will be learning with and sharing these resources in my write-ups, together with my thought process while learning these concepts again. 

I hope my journey and documentation will be helpful to someone else out there.

Thank you so much for reading and I will see you in the next written piece where I will discuss more about math and AI.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please go ahead and leave a comment below or you can contact me through an email. See you at my new post. 

Meanwhile, I would like to recommend a couple of videos that would help convince you that math is your friend not your foe. Links to the videos are listed below.

Why should you study math by Classical Conversations

Why Math is Important by Up and Atom

Mathematics is the sense you never knew you had by Eddie Woo