Stupid Math

Math class is stupid.  Math is not stupid, but the class.  In the classroom, you and your fellow students may study the applications, but let me tell you that they get less useful the farther you go.

For example, I have learned from someone who majored in math that they knew how to untie a knot using math.  Yup, that's right, untie a knot.  This is one of the most useless applications of math I could think of; no one would ever use college level mathematics before they started tugging at the string, and would probably give up before resorting to math.  There is also a mathematical way to determine the amount of clay to use with a potter's wheel, as if eyeballing it wasn't the better solution, it doesn't need to be exact, a guesstimate will work fine.

Math can be very useful, but unless you want to be an engineer or something, you probably won't need anything beyond some basic algebra.  You probably won't even need all of that either, because no matter how many equations you can factor in a textbook, there will probably be next to nothing in a real world situation that works out to nice even numbers.


Sometimes teachers will give word problems as a real world application for what they have learned. Even then the problems aren't always relevant.  Want to find the length of the side of a triangle? Instead of pulling out the Pythagorean Theorem, maybe you just need a ruler.  Two trains leave a station and you want to know how far apart they are.  If this was a problem the trains would have GPS, or maybe the answer didn't matter to begin with.