As a math major, I depend on numbers, formulas, and measurements to perform my duties. As a college student I depend on computers and phones to e-mail projects, send messages, and even create this blog to have discussions with others on important topics. One day when I asked my friend in school to write down some notes on the news, I saw his handwriting and I couldn’t recognize a single word he wrote down. When I questioned his writing skills he told me, “I am a computer science major and thus I do not have to know how to write things down on a piece of paper.” The question of whether this was his opinion or some kind of thinking brought up by this profession is one of the major topics I’m trying to find out hear along with our forgotten ways.
After hearing that, I was shocked at the seemingly stupid remark and so I have to see this issue from his point of view. We live in a digital age when so much is done with computers and other technological innovations. In fact, some professionals say that we have ascended into the age of technology given our extensive use of electronics. You can ask anyone what an iPod or Tablet is without any problem, but if you show them an abacus or a slide rule they’ll give you a weird look and have no idea what those things are. Even common things like compasses can be found on a device in seconds while knowledge of the physical tools is slowly dying out. There was even a point where we used calculators and GPS’s so much that we can’t actually function without them. This leads to terrible consequences if we have an energy crisis or lose power in our electrical devices without being able to charge them for a long period of time.
Due to my intended profession, I have to see if other people in the mathematics field succumb to this kind of thinking. Before high school I was raised to avoid using calculators to use math problems because my family believed I would become far too dependent on it. By the time I was in high school I was required to use a calculator in my studies and ever since then, I (and I’m guessing many other people) find it harder to do certain math problems without the use of a calculator. But then when I went to college I discovered that there are websites and computer tools I can use for the more complex problems. Websites like www.wolframalpha.com allow people to type in a particular formula that could be too difficult or too long for people to find for themselves, which is qualitatively better. There is also the use of Microsoft excel, which allows me to use special formulas multiple times using each cell as the units, which is quantitatively better. It’s great to have these innovations for my profession, and yet I still feel like there are many people who are losing thier touch with certain basic math skills.
It’s important to know the difference between math and writing. As a math major, I deal with a lot of numbers and formulas which require special symbols and patterns. This is very different from writing because while someone rights words from left to right or some other pattern, math formulas can go left to right and top to bottom at the same time. This means that a paragraph can fill up 6 horizontal lines on top while a math problem takes up an entire quadrant of a page (imagine you fold a piece of paper horizontally and vertically and then you fill up one of those rectangles created). Another important difference is that writing paragraphs is just putting together words to make sentences and using those sentences to make a paragraph, while a math problem will involve taking pre-made formulas and plugging in numbers (like raw materials placed in a machine in a factory) in order to create a new answer. The point I’m trying to make here is that writing a story is just like taking puzzle pieces and making a work of art, while mathematics is like using the same templates over and over again to make a limitless number of solutions to help solve real world problems.
This not to say technology is bad for writers or that writing isn’t important to humanity and mathematicians. Without writing we wouldn’t have lectures, historical documents, scientific reports, amazing stories, and many more things. I’m just trying to point out that we have to remember the old ways of writing to protect ourselves from unexpected situations, and that my experience as a mathematician can change how I view the importance of writing and penmanship. How do you feel about writing given your particular profession?