We Use Math Blog

Maybe for you, your senior year of high school was also going to be the last year of math classes. Ever. After that, it’s free sailing; no calculation required.

But it’s not quite so simple.

Interestingly, even after the bell rings and the teacher dismisses math class, your body is constantly making mathematical calculations and judgments with every moment of every day—years after math classes end. Actually, for life.

Check out this article from Scientific American on the ways your brain functions to compute even the minor things of daily living. In some cases, you wouldn’t know your brain’s doing any math at all. (Maybe you prefer it that way.) The fact remains; math is everywhere around (and in) us.

Accountant, teacher, scientist. Playwright?

Believe it or not, math has also crept its way onto the stage.

When a play producer in the Boston area asked teachers to submit ideas for a play that could be performed in high schools, she wasn’t sure math would lend itself to theater. But when she read a script with a math storyline, she quickly changed her mind.

Read the story from The Boston Globe.

Ever wonder about your sleep patterns?

“How does my body choose when to shut off?”

Mathematicians have uncovered a deeper understanding of the human biological clock by studying the brain. And their findings have reversed previous thinking about body function.

“This is a perfect example of how a mathematical model can make predictions that are completely at odds with the prevailing views yet, upon further experimentation, turn out to be dead-on, ” says Daniel Forger, a mathematician at the University of Michigan.

The findings have implications for a whole new study of human function.

BYU’s Math Department has good reason to draw attention to its study. The public is becoming increasingly aware of just how many doors a math degree can open.

You might have your own reasons for not having visited the ‘careers’ section of this site yet: It’s too long, it lists too many options, or maybe, “A good job really isn’t my thing.”

But if that’s not you and you somehow overlooked that page on the site, here are ten more well-paid professions for math majors, provided by CNN. (Then go check out the big list under ‘careers’ at the top!)

Anyone in the field is already aware of the important role math plays in the sciences, national security, economics and even the creative arts — areas in which mathematical modeling can help to produce a desired outcome affecting a range of people.

Perhaps few, however, suspect the power it can have on the individual human mind.

Vicki Alex has made that discovery firsthand, though.

A story in London’s “Daily Mail” newspaper recounts how Vicki, diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in September, was placed into a coma by doctors in order to fight life-threatening infection.

Doctors weren’t sure she would regain consciousness. After three days, they suggested that her parents talk to her in order to “trigger a reaction, ” according to Mail Online.

Once her dad began asking simple arithmetic — her favorite subject — she began to respond.

The following day Vicki began breathing on her own.