*an article I dedicate to my brother Thomas Weiss, who I dearly love and look up to when it comes to anything numbers. And a lot more, too.
Sometimes it feels like the things we learned in school are useless and nothing drives that point home more than the countless math rules that do not apply to our real adult lives. In fact, when you graph the number of mathematical principles that disappoint us over time, it is a monotonically increasing line. Like all other things in life. My brother helped me with my maths and statistics endeavours when I worked on my Bachelor- and Master’s degrees and I most certainly caused his hair to turn grey a bit faster. I have a couple of ideas where maths comes in handy, though.
- Thanks to COVID, everyone now understands that describing yourself as postive on a dating app is a negative, but to be honest, it’s always been annoying.
- A pizza can be evenly divided into eight slices, but it is only meant to serve two. Or one. Your target weight is just a number, and some numbers aren’t even real. Or rational!
- There are no perfect numbers. They are all annoying, especially when you are the one who got stuck dividing up the check at a group dinner again.
- You may have been taught that the average is the mean when, in fact, it is usually the really hot or rich ones that are mean.
- Subtracting things doesn’t always make them smaller. For example, when I subtracted shaving from my schedule, that gnawing feeling that I will die alone got exponentially bigger.
- To find out if a number is divisible by three, you don’t have to add up all the digits in the number. You can just use Google.
- On the subject of angels, Acute angles can be more than 90 degrees. The things is, I look cute from all angles. Obtuse doesn’t mean more than 90 degrees; it means you don’t believe in wearing masks. Straight angles are exactly 180 degrees. But is anyone truly exactly 180 degrees?
- The sum of the interior of a triangle isn’t 180 degrees; it’s 20 degrees below zero when you’re the one being shut out of the throuple. (FYI: A throuple is a relationship between three people who have all unanimously agreed to be in a romantic, loving, relationship together with the consent of all people involved)
- You can’t just multiply by zero to cancel everything out. Covid, for example, you have to subtract.
- The butterfly method isn’t to compare fractions. It’s a sex thing. I won’t explain.
- Cubing things doesn’t increase their volume — there isn’t enough cheese. There is never enough cheese.
- And when you get to the root of it, being a square doesn’t mean you have more to offer. It just makes you very, very boring.
- Items contained within parenthesis are afterthoughts and do not come first (no matter how much your boyfriend wants to make a big deal of that micropenis comment you MEANT AS A JOKE).
- Don’t solve for your X. They need to figure it out on their own.
- The Pythagorean theorem… actually, I have no idea what this is. But Pythagoras sounds hot. Call me, you Greek God, you.
- A negative times a negative does not equal a positive. It equals an ugly divorce.
- A positive times a positive also isn’t positive. It equals a couple with a joint Instagram account that posts inspirational quotes. And no, you don’t think their kid is cute, especially after the baby content started replacing the dog content.
- But who can afford kids? Unless the absolute value is the only relevant measure of net worth, in which case the government owes people money for student loan debt. And don’t even get me started on the cost of healthcare, which could not be more relevant right now. Because the probability of getting COVID is not the frequency of COVID divided by the total population. But it’s worth noting that percentages can be higher than 100. For example, I’m 700% sure the government is not transparant, follows their own agenda which might be unethical, only looks out for the 1% and does not care about the cost and collateral damage of anybody else. As I was saying, who can afford kids?
NOTE: There are some exceptions where math rules do apply. For example, in division, the top does go into the bottom, pending the bottom’s consent, of course. Actually, that’s the only one.
