Frazz by Jef Mallett for March 05, 2025

I’m with you, it never made sense to me either. Good thing in this economy, I don’t gave much money. Less to count.

There’s making sense as “I understand how that works” and then there’s “I understand why it’s worth knowing this.” For a lot of people, math misses on both counts, for others the first one doesn’t matter because the second one is clearly false. And for me and my cohort, they’re both true… and I think we’re richer for it. Even if all you ever want math for is silly (which is better: six 12 ounce bottles for $7.00 or four 16 ounce bottles for $6.40, you’re better served by understanding what you’re doing (comparing cents per ounce, right?) than just trying to use a calculator without knowing which part to divide by the other.

The trouble with mathematics is you have to do all the boring tedious stuff before you get on to the exciting and mysterious stuff.

Math is sometimes the only thing that really makes any sense.

Well, that about sums it up

You gotta learn how to color inside the lines before you can really start experimenting.

I still don’t understand the new math, but at 76 it doesn’t matter.

“…math doesn’t make sense.”

Actually, sense is everything that math makes. It is based in rules and patterns, and how the results follow from those rules and patterns, and how desires and opinions alone cannot cause the results to change. (One can postulate different sets of rules and patterns and derive how those changes also cause changes in results. But if you want a particular result, you have to find the inputs which will cause that desired change, not merely claim that change is required but that the kind of change is arbitrary.)

Math is about cause and effect and the principles of logic. Its results won’t change just because you want them to, but only if things leading to the results change, so it’s important to know and understand how changes in causes produce changes in results.

And that’s a lesson for real life… which I fear that many wish to ignore.

I think some kids liked math (and did well in) because they saw it as a form of escape, and gave them something they could control. I just saw it as an additional hurdle I had to get over in order to graduate.

I don’t see how Math – of all things – doesn’t make sense. You could much more accurately say that about English, History, or (good Lord) Physics.

And you watch an 8 episode series that could have been wrapped up in … oh, two hours.

Kid has it right. There are more lemons on tv than in an orchard. Their only value is that after one episode, a book, almost any book, library or online is better.

I agree with a previous poster that math makes more sense than anything else. It’s all about precision and truth.

Use it for something practical. Like Return On Investment for your college fund.

If math doesn’t make sense, you’re being taught badly. Math makes more sense then anything else.

Five out of four people don’t understand fractions.

You can tell mathematics in the US is woefully lacking in many people. Examples include:

Getting change back from the cashier. Many wouldn’t have any idea how much to return unless that amount was shown on the cash register. Back in the day, that automatic option wasn’t available on a cashier’s computer screen and every money transaction to return change to the customer was done in your head. In fact, both the customer and cashier did it in their head. The customer did so to ensure he was getting the correct amount of change back.

A hamburger chain’s effort (I think Sonic) to compete with McDonald’s 1/4 pound burger by offering 1/3 pound burger for the same price. It didn’t sell and was taken off the menu because people thought they weren’t getting their money’s worth. They thought 1/3 pounder was a smaller burger.

Vegas switching the payouts when playing 21 from 3:2 to 6:5 when they get blackjack. People are looking at the “larger” numbers and think they are getting a better payoff when they get blackjack.

Wait until you learn about Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Or better still, hope you never do.

Math may be the most sensible academic subject of all. Pure logic. Maybe it’s the curriculum they’re using.

See the Babylon Bee article, “Man Still Bitter Over How Much Time He Was Forced To Spend Learning About Parabolas”.

The problem with math is the same as the problem with anything. If you don’t bother to spend your time grasping the basics, you are at a loss in string to understand the complexities.

Added to that, when later in life you have to pretend to know your failure to grasp either becomes crippling and you have to rely upon the clamoring, ignorant crowd to get away with things like, “They’re eating the cats!”.

I wish he was wrong about the TV thing.

Kid, Severance isn’t for anyone your age. I’m 55, and it’s sometimes too much for me!

“Working an integral or performing a linear regression is something a computer can do quite effectively. Understanding whether the result makes sense — or deciding whether the method is the right one to use in the first place — requires a guiding human hand. When we teach mathematics we are supposed to be explaining how to be that guide. A math course that fails to do so is essentially training the student to be a very slow, buggy version of Microsoft Excel.” —Jordan Ellenberg, professor of mathematics, University of Wisconsin–Madison, How Not To Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking (2014)

Like LOST.