Math is important to society for countless reasons. I decided to only focus on three: statistics, money, and science. All of these three play major roles in society, and are math based. A Lot of jobs and technology could not exist without them.
The definition of statistics is the practice of collecting and analyzing numerical data in large quantities. Statistics has a huge role with politics. The way voting is counted utilizes statistics. The presidential election is just one example. In order to become the president, the candidate has to win at least 51 percent of the vote. Statistics also plays a huge role in sports. Some of the stats that are kept include point averages, win percentage, and defensive efficiency ratings. Statistics are more popular than ever in sports, and are actually even changing the way they are played with everyone turning to advanced analytics. Some other important statistics society keeps are crime rates, disease rates, and sale rates. For example the grocery store buys goods, and to see if the customers actually like that certain product they look at the statistics of sales on that product, to see if they should keep selling it. Based on specific crime rates police officers look at the data of crimes done in a certain area which helps them to deploy more officers in that area to stop crimes. Also for disease rates they let us know if there is a huge outbreak going on which helps doctors to find a cure for it. We really use math statistics to measure almost everything in society, which tells us what to focus our attention on.
Money rules the world. In order to be able to process and keep up with financials, people practice accounting. Not only is accounting a profession for a lot of people, it’s crucial for any business to exist. Accounting is very important to businesses because it helps them to find out how much money they are making, and how to save it properly. We also use math to make financial predictions. This affects the stock market, interests rates when members of society need to get loans, and what actually gets produced. Without being an accountant we can do our own personal accounting which of course is self budgeting. We often budget ourselves when heading out to the grocery store by making a list. And that list of food can not reach over the money that you have to spend on food. We also do this when deciding how much of our money we can spend on gas, Christmas presents, clothes, pets, pretty much everything we buy. These are just a few other ways we use accounting and math in our everyday lives.
Science is actually pretty much math based. Science has led to countless advances in medicine and technology. It has even allowed us to leave earth and return. Science was a huge part in space travel but it alone couldn’t have gotten us to space. Math helped them figure out the exact angles, equations, miles per hour, velocity, distance, and gas requirements to get us there and back. NASA had to make these important calculations to leave earth’s atmosphere and get us all the way to the moon. All of the satellites today we depend on for cell phones, GPS, cable television, radar, and WiFi orbits are based on complex math calculations. Math is also a large part of chemistry, which is responsible for the creation of most of the medicines society takes on a daily basis. The development of these medicines also ties into disease rate statistics, which I mentioned earlier. Math is essentially the backbone of science, and both affects every person’s everyday life.
Like what I said in my intro paragraph, math has and is still making countless contributions to society. Even though science is credited with inventions, technology, and advances none of these things would be possible without the help of math. A Lot of times we use math without even knowing we are using math because we are so used to doing it. It’s become a everyday part of life action. There are plenty more amazing topics that use math and are important to society, but these three were particularly important to me.
