Guest Post: Why Humanities People Should Care About Math
Anyone in the traditionally “humanistic” fields (what a dumb term) would see this as a great instance of why it’s awesome to know foreign languages: you can’t be left out of the conversation. No one can pull the wool over your eyes. You can’t be the butt of a joke perpetrated right in front of your face. By knowing a foreign language, you remove an invisible barrier between you and the rest of the world.
One of my colleagues (with kids, and very involved in their education) has made the point that if more effort were made to point out that math is a language, then there might be less of a tendency to let people slide in learning it.
Campaign claims, legislation, environmental movements… even the weather — they’re all conducted with copious references to mathematics, usually in the form of statistics. And the simple fact is, I can convince you of just about anything if I whip out the right statistics and you’re not sure what I’m doing.
Not everything, of course, as it’s been recently observed (again). But convinced of a lot.
Mathematics is a “language” in its own right as well as being a wonderful tool in which to describe and analyse phenomena. For some reason people decide that they cannot learn mathematics or the related subject of statistics.
We hear statistics all the time on TV via the news and weather reports. Is most of this really lost on the general populous?
We also hear of fundamental misunderstandings of quite basics “sciency-mathcy” ideas like half-life and that “yes-no” questions always have 50/50 probability. Without a little mathematics literacy one looses out on so much elementary understanding.