I love math! To anyone who hates math, I ask you to recognize how often you use math every single day. Do you snooze your alarm when it goes off in the morning? You actually use math to determine how many times you can snooze & still have enough time to get ready before you’re running late. Do you love to go shopping? You use math to identify the best sales & optimize your ability to get the most items based on how much money you have in your bank account. Do you like to go out to restaurants or order food for delivery? You use math to decide how much you can afford to order, how much to tip, or how to divide the check among your friends & family. You use math without even thinking about it because math is magic.
Math is a Language
To me, learning math is similar to learning a language. After taking many math courses in colleges, I learned how as long as you understood a mathematical theory, you didn’t even need numbers to find the correct answers. My boyfriend in college would often watch me do my homework unable to understand how I could start with a long & complicated math formula with no numbers to still reach a numerical answer, such as 7.
Math proficiency is actually a superpower that runs in my family. My father is a civil engineer Dad, and my great-grandmother is the first female chemical engineer in the Philippines. Math & Numerology have always been a topic of conversation during family dinners. We discuss Life Path Numbers of different members of our family, as well as the meanings behind each number.
My Math Journey
In grade school, I finished my tests within minutes then spent the rest of the test time drawing on the back. During high school, I was a math tutor. In college, I was the nerd in Calculus who aced the exam without the curve. In college, I almost switched my major from Psychology to Mathematics. But after taking a Game Theory class, I fell in love & decided on Economics instead. My final project evaluating the Game Theory that the Joker uses in The Dark Knight is still a memorable favorite of my time in college.
Even though my primary career history has never involved analytics or too much math, I still proactively find ways to use math a lot. As a bank teller, I mastered my 10-key, & I can still count out cash & make change with ease. As a manager, I’m a fan of giving my team members performance metrics, so they can see how their work fluctuates week over week. And any opportunity to pick up a side project to improve the greater team’s current analytics, I jump at it.
In terms of my blog & social media channels, I’m also obsessed with looking at my insights to see the performance of every single piece of content that I post. I’m incredibly data-driven because numbers don’t lie! I always make note of my daily, weekly, & monthly metrics to create my baseline performance metrics & create new goals for myself over the next week, month, & year.
Why Math is Magic
Nearly everyone around the world uses math every day. And as Cady Heron put it in Mean Girls, “it’s the same in every country”. Even if you don’t speak another language, people around the world are easily able to convert currency, because, despite varying exchange rates, the mathematical conversion will ALWAYS be the same.
Scientists around the world use the same mathematical equations whether it’s a natural science, engineering, medicine, or finance. Determining the success or failure of a company is math. Math is magic because it brings the world together without even trying.
XO Denise
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