I spend a lot of my life doing maths. A lot. Out of five subjects I learn at school now, two of them are maths and two more are science (which, yay, involves more maths). As you might expect from this, I learn quite a bit of new maths most days, but every so often we go back to something nice and simple.
...At least, so we initally think.
I can't quite remember what age I learnt my times tables, but most people know relatively early on that 1 x 2 is 2. So when our maths teacher wrote ' 2 x 1 = 2' on the board one lesson, the whole class was reassured, if slightly confused. Yay! We are doing something we know! Yeah. Guess again. Instead we learnt about identities (Which is anything that can multiply a number to give that number: X x identity = X) and the identity matrix. So now, the number 1 had a fancy property that I had known but never called it. Ah, the ignorant bliss of primary school maths where we don't need fancy names or matrices!
Long division is another one of those things. We all sit through it in primary school but once you hit the middle of secondary school it gets lost amongst the calculators. It was quite nice today to have a lesson where we spent 10 minutes just doing a long division. With remainders as well. Not messy decimals. (Concerningly though, about a quarter of the class said they hadn't done it before/couldn't remember/used another method. And we are supposedly the bright ones...). It was very comforting until we stuck algebra in there. Long division is a little more complex when there are unknown numbers and powers of unknown numbers floating about!
And even though matrixes are not too bad, and long division with algebra is actually kinda fun, I still long for the days of simple maths :( But progress nevertheless! Any other interesting 'And you thought you knew it...' things lurking out there?
No comments:
Post a Comment