h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I was lousy at Maths and although I managed to scrape a decent pass in the subject at O-level, it was hard work. I noticed that the kids who were good at English tended to struggle in Maths, and visa versa. Did anyone else experience this?

Nah I loved English AND Maths - I was really sorry to have to choose between science and arts subjects when it came to A levels.

Oh, and I went on to do a Maths degree, become an accountant, earn my living doing sums (of a sort) .....and am at this moment involved in a radio quiz dispute concerning the formula for the volume of a sphere

I always liked math and ended up a chemical engineer. The going got a little heavy in the later years of college, though, with "partial differential equations" seeming to be from some parallel universe.


I also enjoyed reading, but in those later years of school, I recall asking a professor about taking his course on the American novel. He said if I was an engineering major, he would not let me - they read a novel a week, and I wouldn't do it. Probably right.

I guess you have to be an artist to argue about the volume of a sphere.

i liked the solutions and tried to do the sums in many different ways but apparently maths has a language of its own syntax so difficult so i prefer not doing it much out side schooling

When I was in primary school the headmaster had been a maths teacher and when your own teacher was off sick he used to take the class for the day. We'd have maths lessons lasting the whole day and it was absolutely superb, he made the subject live and even the people who weren't particularly good at maths seemed to enjoy it.

Being one of the token Americans here, I just had to look it up:

"maths (maths) noun
(used with a sing. verb) Chiefly British.
Mathematics."

So maths is a hard subject, and our cricket innings is over ... rather than math is tough and his four innings pitched were a disaster.

I may not need a translator on my next trip to London. Mate.

I liked both maths & english language - not so keen on literature (the analytical aspect). English language wasn't an A level option in my day. If it had been, I might have ended up on a very different career path. As it is, I stuck with maths & sciences & ended up being an optometrist, which I enjoy.

The curriculum seems much more enjoyable now, or perhaps I just have more appreciation of learning these days.

(4/3)pi * r³

I love how Americans can only handle one 'mathematic' at a time ... only kidding of course (don't wanna be accused of racism).

Mmmm, I never really got the point of maths. Does anyone really need triganomatry (i know this is not how to spell it!) or most mathy things unless they have a 'maths based' job (if you know what i mean!). Of course i realise that everybody uses some sort of maths with budgeting their home or paying for their house, but teaching us about tax and interest rates would send us off into the wide world much better!

Ah, now that's a good point! Should school only teach you "useful" things that you will need later in life? (but who knows what you will end up doing?)

Or should it teach you ways of thinking?

Thinking about a problem mathematically is definitely a particular skill (deciding whether it's arithmectical, and if so how do you solve that puzzle, f'rinstance).

but as an ex Maths (that's "Math" for our US readers) teacher, I know the "relevance" argument was frequently levied at me.

No, I stand over the benefit of being able to recognise the fundamental "what's going on here?" in a problem, and the ability to reduce a situation to a solvable, reliable, irrefutable equation.

Oh dear, "in Maths we trust"

I loved Maths at school - still do more than 20 years later! Hated English - one of my English teachers said I was incapable of tackling a problem not solvable with a pocket calculator. I was rather proud of that comment!

Well personally I think everyone should learn physics, and by extension maths, rather that having the world split into 'physicists', who invent everything, and 'non-physicists', who have to have everything made simple for them because they don't understand the way the world works. Everything would get done much more efficiently if everybody understood exactly what was going on in any given situation. Though I would say that, and the same could be said for, say, psychiatry.

I agree, mathematical thinking can be very ... umm, practical. I (vaguely) recall an example where an engineer and a math major were given a problem. Two glasses are filled to exactly the same level, one with water and one with wine. A spoonful of water is taken and added to the wine. Then a spoonful is taken from the (mostly) wine and added back to the water. This is done three more times, the glasses ending up at exactly the same level. Which glass has the higher concentration of its original contents? The engineer will usually start writing down a formula for the concentration and the successive transfers. The math major will say the concentrations have to be the same, since whatever wine is missing from the wine glass has to be in the water glass, and equal to the missing water, since both glasses have the same total liquid. QED.

(Or something like that - going from memory here, and I'm an engineer.)

I loved maths right up to O-level (which I took in 1980) and got a most excellent grade. However, i wanted to do English French and Russian for A-level, and went off to the summer holidays expecting to come back and do that.

Only to find that French had been switched to Economics and English to Maths (combined Pure & Applied) - because "they couldn't make the timetable work, and anyway it would be too many essay subjects..." my parents tried (not too hard) to argue the toss. But A-level maths is really different, plus I didn't like the teacher (to be fair, she did her best but what can you do faced with an obstinate and disappointed teenager? I'm sure she loathed me but she never let it show).

Net result?

I spent most of my maths time doing my Russian homework. Which didn't go unnoticed, since there were only 5 of us in the class.

I'm still angry about that.

I love math, but love English as well. I am currently in my second year of college and am a double major: pure mathematics and English (maybe journalism maybe literature- still a little undecided). Most everyone I talk to thinks that I'm crazy for taking the two and see them as being on opposite sides of the spectrum. I do, however, hate sciences which are generally considered to go hand in hand with mathematics.

My wife was a pure math major in college, so I (an engineering major) looked at her textbook one day ("Real Analysis", maybe?). I couldn't decide which was the top of the page. I had to take math courses, but they were generally titled "math science", more applied stuff like linear equations. We both liked the story about asking different majors to prove that all odd numbers are prime.

Math major: "Three's a prime, five's a prime, seven's a prime ... the rest is true by induction."

Physics major: "Three's a prime, five's a prime, seven's a prime, nine is experimental error, ..."

Engineer: "Three's a prime, five's a prime, seven's a prime, nine's a prime, eleven's a prime ..."

Whatever works.

Ref P13, in fact if one decides to study only one Science then that science should be CHEMISTRY. Chemistry is the one science that interfaces with every other, and is therefore called THE central science. It interfaces with maths, physics, biology, geology and engineering (see the chemical engineer who posted above. Also chemists are the only scientists who actually create new materials (compounds) e.g. drugs, dye molecules, antibiotics; so chemistry is also a CREATIVE science.

Being the referenced "chemical engineer", I did get some memories from your post. Chem Lab, where my girlfriend almost blew her head off dumping some sodium into the sink. Same lab, another student has done something wrong, fumes causing loud coughing, the graduate student running the lab says, "Stop that!" And for Chem.E.'s, the killer course was "Physical Chemistry", a junior level course on thermodynamics. A popular bumper sticker at the campus store was "Honk If You Passed P.Chem"

My memory was that although Physical Chemistry was the hardest branch to understand in lectures, and the exams appeared difficult, I also got my highest grades in Phys Chem.