Is the mathematics you learn in school really needed in everyday life?

It seems like we live in a world where all the calculations we need are done for us. We have automated supermarket checkouts to tell us how much we need to pay for our shopping, we carry gps phones in our pockets to work out optimal routes for us, and price comparison sites find us the cheapest possible deals on holidays and many other things.

Our world is very different from the way it was when a lot of the mathematics we teach in school was invented. The ancient Babylonians had methods for solving (some) quadratic equations and also knew about Pythagoras's theorem about a thousand years before he was born.

I need to know a lot about mathematics for my job, but that's certainly not true for everyone. What do you think about the mathematics we teach at schools? Should we be covering different topics? Should we teach it at all? How much mathematics do you use outside the classroom?

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My name is William Lee and I teach maths to students studying for the BSc Mathematics degree at the University of Huddersfield. I also work a lot on developing mathematical models in collaboration with industry, helping them uncover hidden meaning in their data and better understand how their processes work and can be improved.

I studied a lot of math at University as electrical engineer....a lot math i dont use now at work etc.....for me math at university is just to show employer Hey, you see, i can learn difficult stuff, hire me, i can learn your difficult stuff at work like i learned difficult math at univeristy.

i am more intrested in math now than when i was student, i want to learn math stuff more deeply, why some formulas work how they do, and do visualize math....like this teacher....all teacher needs to be like this
such visualized Math is soooooooo fun compared how they teach at schools and universities.

William , i want to have a discussion with you about something i found in math, something extraordinary, yet it is simple but troughly extraordinary, i want you to analyze it and give me your opinion about it, is it ok for you????

Oh I vaguely remember that! yeah you had loads of pens you brought over lol. What WAS that

A lot of what I learnt in school has never been used, whether is is Pythagoras, quadratic equations or anything beyond relatively basic maths. A lot of the harder sections of GCSE maths has been replaced by technology.

If I need to work out an angle or the length of a line I can throw it into Sketchup or Vectorworks and it will give me to exact answer. Floor areas and volume can be solved by 3D modelling which is not that hard to do and in modern design I can run in all in 2D and it will give me the 3D solutions.

The old "you won't have a calculator in your pocket" couldn't be further from the truth now. I use my phone calculator just as much as I do excel to do calculations.

The curriculum needs to focus on more practical applications rather than abstract algebra which by in large is utterly useless in the current format. I do use algebra to write Excel and Mail Merge formulas but none of this was ever taught at school, we briefly touched on it at university but not in any meaningful way.

I was one of the children at school that actually enjoyed maths but as the years went by I struggled to see the point as it was never useful maths, just learning for the sake of ticking boxes.

Jokes aside probably my favourite application of maths I've used is in video games, working out probabilities of rare drops in Runescape. e.g. If the probability of obtaining a unique item from the Barrows minigame is 1/17.4, what's the probability that I'll go 50 runs without getting anything, or what's the probability that I get 5 items in 100 runs or fewer
If I went a bit further with it I could work out upper and lower bounds of money gained per hour.

People complain about how they'll never need algebra in real life then get to university and complain that Chemistry is too hard

I'd love to hear from someone who uses other areas of mathematics, such as geometry or probability, outside the classroom. If you've found that studying mathematics has improved your logical thinking skills please do get in touch. Is there a useful mathematical topic we don't teach enough of in schools?

School should not becompulsory. If it was as wonderful as the communists say its, it wouldn't need to be.

This is such an interesting argument. There are bits of maths which I have used. I do A-Level Geography and Physics, I don’t do A-Level maths but I have received maths support at school. Some maths skills I have picked up at GCSE have been useful in my A-Level subjects such as iteration for physics. And I have found maths skills lessons helpful and I know I will need some maths for Geography because that is what I would like to do but some of the maths I have learnt is not that useful and may not be in the future.

A lot of maths is used without thought. If I asked you whats 5×5, the answer 25 would probably pop in your head without thought, same with estimation of distances and angles, they're used all the time without thought, but someone might have no idea on how to judge distances if they weren't taught the same boring maths thousands of times over to make it second nature. In fact I know a few people like this who ask me to add up the price of items which were £1,£1 and £2. And questions like "how big is 36cm?"

In primary school, I learnt units of measure and have a rough idea, so I can estimate distances, capacity, angles etc., without that theres probably going to be some inefficiency.

You often hear from Americans "why don't we learn how to do taxes", but if they had listened in math(s) they would have realised that they just have to apply basic numeracy skills.

Then theres the argument of "when am I ever going to use this in life ?"
which is absurd because that's like suggesting that we should just ask children if they want to enter a field that uses maths, but we shouldn't, the point is that some people use it and minors need to be taught a bit of everything.
Someone who has delivered Amazon packages for 10 years is not going to need to know how to find the intersection of a line and a parabola, but it does help with problem solving. If I never learnt how to do the aforementioned and then a lot of what I'd second nature when I'm studying higher level maths, would take a much longer time to understand.

There is evidence that the babylonians knew some pythagorean triples, but not Pythagoras' theorem, because they wrote down some triples, but didn't know the theorem.

Also a lot of news stories about scientific findings are misinterpreted because of lack of understanding of maths. Ask any non maths person what an average is and a lot of them will say " not high, not low but the middle" rather than one of the correct answers- total/count or middle in a group (not middle of all possible values as its wrongly assumed to be). even terms like "unlikely", "more likely" and "higher chance" are misinterpreted to be absolutes because of lack of understanding of basic probability. An increased understanding helps the individual and a collective group.


I dont understand the idea that a machine can do it. I know people who dont even know what to put in to a calculator or any sort of programming software. It's like asking someone to do numerical simulations for travelling waves solutions to a particular equation, but without solving some boring equations by hand you dont develop an intuition for what you're doing.

They mostly work on networks.

I like your idea of splitting up the maths GCSE. What topics would you put in the maths for non-mathematicians course?

That's really interesting - I had no idea. Are there any more applications of mathematics to video games?