Have you ever used traditional mathematical methods or solutions in your life?

I was a professional cake decorator. I had to be able to calculate how to divide a cake into a particular number of equal sized pieces, how to measure and divide the circumfrance of a cake so that decorations would come out right.
I have traveled cross country several times, and being able to time out distance, time, mpg, etc. is important to determining arrival times, refueling costs, etc.
When I moved halfway across the country a few years ago, it came in handy in determining how I would relocate my stuff. When I learned how much it would cost to rent a truck, I calculated the miles, how much gas would cost. I found a truck which I could get for fifteen hundred dollars.
My gas calculation was off by only eighty dollars, but in the good. I found gas much cheaper than expected once I crossed the first state line.

@Patty_Melt Thanks to Maths, you saved some bucks…. :)

OP:“1 bus takes 30 minutes to travel 3 Km at a speed of 5 miles per hour….”
Me: [gets a seizure]

I don’t usually use math, besides basic counting. There are some areas of my “expertise” that use some mathematical methods, but I avoid it like plague. I even avoid reading numbers in a text when I see it, just fly over it.

@Sneki95 the bus example is just an example as you can see I wrote this “e.g” I have not written full question because I don’t remember it. My point was just to let you all about the type of questions were asked during school time and I am using the same here (but not the actual question) :)

i use it all the time! I use Pythag. Ther. to lay out boards I want to be 90 degrees. I mark one at 3 ft one at 4 ft and move the two until the marks are 5 ft apart.
I’m an engineer and use all kinds of math all the time.

@LuckyGuy Glad to hear that it is used somewhere…. Lol

I put in a patio and used it to make sure the sides were perfectly perpendicular. All I needed was a tape measure.

I use it all the time. Just yesterday I had to figure out how much sand, rock, etc I needed, converting square feet to cubic yards.

Also, use estimating and rounding on a regular basis while shopping.

@rojo . Come on. You learned that in 5th grade . also 5, 12, 13.
I actually use it when i make stuff.

Also had to figure the radius and arc of a circle given an width and height. I was cutting trim for the top of my bookshelves. Had to look that up and refresh my memory on this one. It had been too many years.

Isn’t that 3,4,5 rule handy? You always know the sides and top are perfectly perpendicular
Also it is handy If you are marking off a property line. 3,4,5 can be any units. ft, km, miles It just depends upon the length of your measuring tape. Let’s say our tape is 100 ft long and you know one side of property and want to make a perpendicular field line. Use 60ft, 80ft and 100ft as the 3,4,5 . You mark off the known side 60 ft. Then attach a string or wire.at the place you want the perpendicular angle to start. Mark the string at 80 ft and move it around where you think it should be . Then put one ond of the tape at the 60 ft mark and measure the distance between that and the mark on the string until it is at 100ft. Perfect 90 degree angle.- without a transit!

I used it to find the right position for the bridge on a banjo for a friend (helps to know the halfway length of the strings should be a the 12th fret).
Find how many bags of mulch I needed to cover the gardens with 4 inches of mulch (2 cubic feet per bag is 3456 cubic inches divided by 4 inches deep equals 846 square inches or 6 square feet ===> 2 foot by 3 foot.

@mhd14 I know, bruh, I was joking. :)

I write code for a living and also for fun. Probably the most math I’ve used in my programming endeavors was for a little aquarium game I wrote. The fish’s velocity is a 3D vector. Had to use a lot of trig to get the fish to face in the direction of their velocity vector. Otherwise we’d have fish swimming backwards or sideways or some shit.

Programmers probably use math more than anyone, especially in scientific applications. My old job I had to do the engineering and budget calcs. My new job is more about device settings and project. management. I use trig at home alot but I can usually use geometry “tricks” I learned drafting when I don’t feel like calculating which is most of the time.

I use a fair amount of algebra and geometry on a regular basis.

Anybody that cooks complete meals and wants to have everything ready at the same time is using algebra to figure out when to cook each dish.

I got a graduate degree 21 years ago in Liberal Arts. I read an enormous amount of classics including Euclid.

I always wondered what text I would first pick up to answer a question after graduation. I guessed it would be Aristotle, but I made room for the idea that it might be Plato instead.

As it turned out, it was Euclid. I do not now recall what I was pondering. It was not numbers, but Euclid had the answer.

Too bad I’m not taking a math course at the moment. I could solve all of the equations with ”@Sneki95 gets a seizure.” :D

I use rate-time-distance and arithmetic and some algebra, and a bit of geometry. In game programming, trigonometry and geometry (esp. Pythagorean theorem), and some of the math of physics, etc.

Ooo! Here is something recent. A sound wave travels at the speed of sound diagonally across a flowing fluid. An identical sound wave is sent in the opposite direction across the flowing fluid. We calculate the fluid velocity by looking at the time difference between those two sound waves.

In the form of your example… Two rowing teams are on opposite shores of a stream. One team is located downstream by the width of the stream, w. Both teams are identical start at the same time and row at a velocity, v, in still water. What is the velocity of the water as a function of the time difference between their arrivals at the opposite side? Ignore boundary layer, and laminar and turbulent flow effects.

Answer: The bus arrives in San Francisco at 5;15 PM.

^^I worked with hydro acoustics for a few years. Used doppler shift on reflected sound waves from suspended particulates to calculate velocities at different depths. Cool stuff.

@LuckyGuy No bus arrives at 5:15 p.m. in San Francisco; that is when the city is gridlocked.

@ARE_you_kidding_me Neat. We use doppler shift for acceleration and time of flight difference for flow. A very fast and accurate stopwatch is needed.

@zenvelo I should have specified “on a Sunday.”

Damn, @mhd14, now you got @LuckyGuy going. There will be no stopping the math now. ;-D

@Patty_Melt You should see the analysis I did to determine if I needed surgery 7 years ago. It was a thing of beauty.

I thought of another thing. This area was hit by a high winds and cold weather that knocked out power for 100,000 residents. Of course I have a generator (2 actually) but they are noisy. The only critical thing I need to run is my sump pump and maybe a refrigerator. I used math to determine if I could use an inverter and two car batteries to power the sump pump for a a day so I would not need to start the generator.
Yes I can. Now if I lose power I just turn on one elelctircal switch and plug my sump pump into the inverter outlet ans let the thing run. If power does not come ion in 8 hours I can start thinking about the generator.
Power = Volts x Amp, Typical battery storage is 42 amp hours. Sump pump draws 300 watts continuous, 500 Watts surge, it runs at 3% duty cycle. Inverter draws 0.5 watts on standby.

You know the expression “Measure twice. Cut once.”? Well I say “Do the math twice. Then build it.”

Oh, and I was actually just using some probability. I went to a grocery store (Trader Joe’s) and drove away three blocks (one south, two west) when I saw an abandoned red shopping cart. I thought it might be TJ’s so I called and let them know, but before I did, I considered that there’s also a Safeway a few blocks away to the east and north. I think Safeway may also have red carts, and a seemingly higher rate of vagrants who might be prone to taking carts away. I spent some time considering the chances it might be a Safeway cart, considering brownian movement, the Cartesian street map, and their relative positions, and became curious how much more likely it was a TJ cart. I decided it was highly more likely it was a TJ cart, but that it would not be possible to estimate the odds without really knowing the range distribution of typical abandonment.

@LuckyGuy is forgetting all the math he did when the lava flow threatened Pahoa on Hawaii’s Big Island.

That’s true! I was ready to get on a plane! (If I could stay at Jake’s place. :-) )

When I was framing concrete formd for foundation slabs I used geometry and algebra all the time. Also, there’s a lot of mathematics in electrical ans electronics.

All the time

@Patty_Melt Hahahaha…. Now @LuckyGuy has to wait till the Bus arrive…

I used math all the time when I was doing production accounting and preparing cost analysis and projected budgeting. When I was a clerk at an insurance agency, there was a product sold that had a portion of it exempt from sales tax and the agents never knew how to calculate the sale, so they would come to me and I would teach them Algebra. (this was before computers on every desk and Microsoft Excel worksheets)

When I craft, I use Pi to calculate the volume in cylinders (I make round soap in tube forms and cut them into disks.) And when I’m building stuff with angles, like plastic or cold porcelain sculptures, or even fixing broken furniture, using math simplifies things greatly. Being able to calculate the exact length of a side you are missing or need to build is essential. Or even the surface area that needs to be painted, so I know how much paint to buy. Math is an every day tool.

I love math. I have a high school level math Web page. I do math tutoring and pursue math as a hobby. I have never had occasion to make practical use of math beyond arithmetic.

For the record, out of curiousity I was trying to figure out how much energy was being wasted by all that lava. Then I got to thinking about how much it was worth and how long i could heat my house with it. Using heat of fusion, heat capacity, estimate of temperature, etc,
Every 100 kg , call it 200 pounds, is worth about $2.00 in heat if you could ship it to my house and keep it at temperature.
A cubic meter weighs about ~2200 kg so it would be worth about $44.

I’ll stick with burning wood from all my downed trees.

Today i used and it is still early.
The snow and ice is melting here and my fish pond is almost uncovered so ican see the water. The water is cloudy so I need to add some clearing agent. But first, I need to figure out the volume of the pond.
It is an oval with major diameter of 13 ft and a minor diameter of 8 ft.
The average depth is about 4 ft.
The clearing agent dosing instructions say to apply 50 ml per 1000 gallons. Too little and it might be ineffective. Too much and it might bother the fish.
I calculated the right amount to add.

@LuckyGuy It’s called ‘flocculent’. ;)

@cazzie More specifically, a ‘cationic flocculent”. ;-)

hehehe… Happy fishies!

I don’t have anything to add. I just stopped by because I knew I’d find @LuckyGuy here, and thought I’d say howdy.
Howdy!

Oh!...cationic flocculant! When i first saw it, my brain read it as “catatonic flatulent”!