Math Isn’t Real!
Exponent Elementary School wasn’t a normal school. The kids there loved math and spent all day cooped up in their odd-shaped classrooms pouring over hundreds and hundreds of math problems and spent their evenings memorizing every formula they could find.
The select few who attended this school had a constant appetite for crunching numbers, but none of them really understood or cared where else math existed other than in their thick textbooks.
Eddie Quation was one of these children He had been at this school for six years and hadn’t gone through one single day since he had arrived without his calculators and eversharp pencils. He loved math, bujt thought that those stories he had heard about math existing outside the classroom were just make believe, made up by some unfortunate child who had had to leave E.E.S. He dreaded the day he would have to leave.
One day, while deciding between square roots or trigonometry problems, Eddie stumbled upon a book entitled, "The Amazingly Informative and Extremely Educational Guide to Math Using Story Problems". The book was hidden and dusty and looked like it hadn’t b een touched in years, he brushed away some dust and realized the book had probably never been opened. He couldn’t understand the title. "Story problems," he thought to himself, "This can’t be a math book, who ever heard of math relating to anything other than nujmbers?" But sure enough, he opened the book and found not only numbers, but words mixed in with the numbers. He had never seen anything like it. He rushed over to his friend, Pie Skware, who was deeply immersed in his 417th problem of the day, and showed him what he had found.
"You’ve got to be kidding!" exclaimed Pie. "Math has nothing to do with anything other than putting 2 or 3 random numbers together." Both curious, they flipped quickly through the new-smelling pages. They hadn’t read much other than numbers in so many years that it was a bit of a shock to their eyes to see so many words and sentences at once.
They stopped at one page that said, "The radius of a coin is 0.5 cm., how much is this coin worth?"
"What is this supposed to mean?!" questioned Eddie. "Only circles had radii, h;ow can they say that there is something other than a circle that has a radius?"
"Wait a minute," said Pie as he fished a coin from his pocket. He examined it closely and then shouted, "A coin is a circle! Circles aren’t just curved lines drawn on paper, they’re all around us!"
The boys were astounded by their discovery. Maybe all these stories they had heard about math existing out of their scribblers weren’t fairytales after all. The boys skimmed through more problems, and after each one, became more and more certain that math wasn’t just a bunch of made up numbers, the numbers all mean something.
The thing that really made the boys think was the statement they read saying that math exists even in sports. "I don’t quite believe that." Eddie stated, "Sports are about strength and endurance, they have nothing to do with math and numbers."
"I agree." replied Pie. "Whoever wrote this crazy book has just gone too far by saying that." With that, the boys closed the book, wondering how anyone could possibly say that.
Later that night as everyone was studying their various formulas and equations, it hit Eddie that maybe that book really wasn’t lying after all. He was busy finding the area of a square when he realized that his favourite game, chess, had many squares involved with it . Then he thought about golf, it had always been a bit too strenuous for him, but he did have a little b it of an understanding of the game. He figured that in order to find your handicap, you must have to use math! And what about betting at the racetrack? Eddie wasn’t one who liked to take big risks like that, but he figured there must be at least some math involved in order to find your odds of winning the jackpot.
Eddie opened his newfound book once more, this time to a chapter on population. He read about a group of scientists who studied fossils of various primates, such as monkeys and apes, over millions of years. The book then gave a list of populations foir both monkeys and apes at various intervals from 23 million years ago up to the present day. It asked the reader to put the information into a graph.
Eddie loved graphing and quickly pulled out a sheet of his super-deluxe graphing paper and quickly sketched a graph. He was amazed although he had always enjoyed graphing, he had never been able to see how it could actually be useful. But as he plotted each point, it became more and more clear to him. He joined the points together and couldn’t believe his eyes! Just by looking at his points and comparing the line of monkey populations to that of the apes, he saw that the changes in makeup of the population were constant until around 7 million years before, when both started to level off. He further examined the points and found that 20 million years ago the total primate population consisted of 80% apes and 20% monkeys. As the years went on, he found that the population of monkeys steadily increased and the population of apes decreased steadily until the present day where the population was 90% monkeys and 10% apes. He looked at the point where both lines joined and decided that at this point the populations must have been the same for each.
Eddie called Pie and explained his discoveries. "I never imagined even in my wildest dreams that math could ever give me information like this!" Eddie exclaimed.
"There must be so many other areas of the world that relate to math." started Pie, "I want to find them all!"
"Well let’s get started then." Eddie said. "Now we know that math isn’t just something made up by a bunch of teachers to keep us busy all day, it’s all around us just waiting to be discovered."
And from that day on, Eddie Quation and Pie Skware travelled the world discovering countless ways in which they could relate their days of crunching numbers at Exponent Elementary to the simple, but amazing wonders of the world.