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Ryan Harris

Staff Writer

Ladies and gentlemen, I present you– mathematics. The most hated subject among nearly every student ever. Now I represent a dying race, people who, wait for it…. actually like math.

It’s not even that I “like” math, I love math, more specifically Calculus.

We’ve been identified as many different delightful titles: nerds, geeks, and my personal favorite, crazy.

Well if ‘crazy’ means having a great appreciation for math concepts and how they relate to the world around us, then send me to the loony bin.

I remember junior year taking pre-calculus and absolutely HATING it.

Now you’re probably thinking: “But Ryan, I thought you said you loved math?”

Before you accuse me of hypocrisy, my love of math is certainly a new-found one.

Like many kids growing up, and many kids now, I utterly loathed math class. I know that each and every one of you guys remembering sitting in math class, always having this question pop into your head: “What’s the point of all this?”

“I’m never going to pursue a career in math so why would I ever need to learn this?”

I was once in the same position myself and I didn’t have a change of heart until this year, when I starting taking calculus.

I used think math was the most boring subject in the world. Who wants to learn about triangles, absolute value, and polynomials; when there’s massive wars and glorious adventures being told in subjects like history and english?

I will say this: there are extremely boring and frustrating parts to math, like there are with history, english, or science.

I would rather watch paint dry or eat GLASS than have to deal with stuff like domain and range, matrices, and box-and-whisker plots.

And there’s limits…… Oh, how my anger for thee burns like sun that we orbit.

But even with the boring parts and my hatred for all things related to limits, there’s so much more interesting and, quite frankly, cool things about mathematics.

One of the basic concepts of mathematics is the concept of inputs and outputs. You put something in, to get out something different. Something is always a function of anything. This evident in pretty much EVERYTHING ever.

Think about it.

How much time you have to get ready for school is dependent on what time you wake up in the morning, or even if you wake up at all. When you tell yourself to go to sleep at 10pm so that you can wake up at 6am, there’s math behind that thought process.

It’s so second nature to you that you don’t even of something like that as math.

Also the idea of derivatives, or rates of change are constant throughout everyday life as well.
If you were to go to sleep at 11 or 12, the amount of sleep you get would decrease. Thus, the amount of time you have to get ready is also decreased by rate as well.

I know it’s crazy to think but, math is, and always will be apart of our lives whether we want it to or not.

Plus, talking about complex mathematical problems always makes me feel like a super genius of some kind. You guys should try it sometime.

P.S. This column was in NO way trying to kiss up to my calc teacher, Brad Latimer. But, if my calc grade suddenly changes from a “B” to an “A”, I wouldn’t object.