Math Is Life

Back when my kids were still in school, they often complained about their math homework. I always reminded them, “Math is life.”

My goal was to make them realize that math is not a tedious exercise designed by sadistic school teachers to torture students, but rather it’s the foundation of all of life’s endeavors.

 Technically speaking, math IS life. If you break down living organisms to their most basic elements, you’ll have quite a puddle on the floor. You’ll also have biology, chemistry, and physics, all of which are specialized fields of mathematics, which means math is life and life is math.

This is why theologians say the language of God is mathematics. OK, maybe theologians don’t say that, but mathematicians say it since they’re desperate to convince kids that math is not a tedious exercise designed by sadistic school teachers to torture students, but rather was invented by God, so go blame Him.

By the way, God’s native language is ancient Hebrew, and math is His second language, but He speaks it so fluently you can’t even detect an accent.

When I told my kids that math is life and they should be grateful for the opportunity to acquire such useful knowledge, they replied, “Yeah, well what about algebra? No one uses algebra in the real world.”

“All right,” I conceded, “algebra is, in fact, a tedious exercise designed by sadistic school teachers to torture students, but all the other types of math are very important. You can’t survive in the modern world without good math skills.”

Despite my passionate sermonizing, my kids remained skeptical. Apparently, most high school students in America nowadays also do not see the need to be proficient in math. A recent study found that 12th-graders in the U.S. rank 19th out of 21 developed nations in math skills. (A statistic which caused the average high school senior to say, “Cool! We’re in the top half!”)

Ignorant high school students eventually become ignorant adults. They then become easy prey for people who possess good math skills, but who do not possess the knowledge of Who created math and what He plans to do to those who swindle the least of their brethren. I speak, of course, of the folks who run gambling casinos and state lotteries.

Lotteries are nothing more than a tax on people who did poorly in math class. That being said, however, when the nation was caught up in “Powerball frenzy” a few weeks ago, I shamefully admit that I participated. But I’ve got a good excuse. My co-workers set up an office pool and anyone interested in joining threw in two bucks. They bought a bunch of tickets, and if any ticket won, the money would be split evenly among all those in the pool.

I fully understand the odds of winning Powerball are so infinitesimally small it’s effectively zero, but here’s the unlikely scenario that haunted me: one of the tickets actually would win, and every single employee at the firm would get 10 or 20 million dollars — except me. And the next morning I’d be the only person who showed up for work. I can barely do my job, let alone the jobs of 19 other people. And who would answer the phone when I was in the bathroom?

So I grudgingly joined the office pool, not because I had ridiculous fantasies of becoming rich, but because I had nightmarish fantasies of being the only person left in the company who still needed to work for a living. 

And guess what? We did not win. Wow, who saw that coming? So there are two lessons here: “math is life,” and don’t waste your two bucks.