Turns out, math isn't important.

An editorial, written by a professor emeritus of mathematics, statistics and computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago is running in McClatchy-owned newspapers today, and states that math's importance to the daily lives of Americans is overrated.  In fact, he claims, the attempt to make math seem essential is a marketing ploy by colleges to create and sell mathematics education programs.

He asks exactly the question my students ask, namely "How much math do you really need in everyday life?" and goes on to say you should not only ask yourself that question, but "the next 10 people you meet, say, your plumber, your lawyer, your grocer, your mechanic, your physician or even a math teacher."

I'll leave the "math teacher" issue aside, and address physicians for a moment.  Consider the following scenario, a standard of every intro probability and statistics course:

You suspect you may have a brain cloud, for which there is only one cure - jumping into a live volcano.  If you do in fact have a brain cloud, you will survive the jump, become perfectly healthy and live happily ever after with someone who looks remarkably like Meg Ryan.  If you do not, you will die a gruesome death. However, if you have a brain cloud but do not leap into the volcano, you will die an equally gruesome death within days.  So it is imperative you make the right decision, which means you need to know, as surely as possible, whether you have the brain cloud or not.

Fortunately, brain clouds are very rare - affecting only 1 in 1,000,000 people worldwide.  Moreover, there is a test for tomhanksiplexy (the technical name for brain cloud) which is accurate 99.9% of the time.  There are no other symptoms or indications of any kind (up until the moment of gruesome death, of course).

You go to a physician and take the test.  He comes back from the lab, sadly shaking his head, and tells you that you have a 99.9% chance of having a brain cloud, and should go jump in a volcano immediately.  Your response is to...

a) jump in a volcano.

b) decry the state of mathematics education in America, and wonder how anyone could imagine it's unimportant.

If you chose (a), you're not alone, but you are, in all likelihood, gruesomely dead.  In fact, you're in a mathematical hell crowded not only with high school dropouts, but the vast majority of physicians as well.

Since the test is 99.9% accurate, if 999,999,000 healthy people take it, 999,999 will have false positive results. (one tenth of one percent of 999,999,000 is 999,999).  If 1,000 people who have brain clouds take the test, 999 will have correct positive results.  So if 1,000,000,000 random people take the test (and 1 of every 1,000,000 has a brain cloud), there will be 1,000,998 positive results, of which 999 will be correct.  That's approximately a 0.000998 chance of having a brain cloud, given you have a positive result.  Said another way, that means there's a 99.9002% chance you DO NOT have a brain cloud, even if you have a positive test, which is accurate 99.9% of the time.

Nobody expects "the average" person to get that problem right.  But people have a right to expect that their physician, when reporting on the results of their most recent battery of tests, will understand what those tests do or do not "prove."  Most physicians cannot do that, because math education in America doesn't do a good enough job equipping our future physicians and lawyers and plumbers and grocers with the math and cognition skills to think through a problem like that.

Okay, maybe doctors need math, but surely not lawyers, right?  Here's the same problem in a courtroom:  In a town with two taxi companies, a woman saw a man rob a liquor store and jump into a cab at 8:07 PM on Tuesday night.  The witness testifies that the robber got into a Yellow Cab, which has 10% of the cabs in town; the Ocher Cab company has the rest. You've checked her ability to recognize the difference between the two cabs, and concluded she's accurate 80% of the time.  Based on this information, and assuming the witness is telling the truth as she knows it, what are the odds that the perpetrator got into a Yellow Cab?

At this point, my students tell me that if they are confronted with situations like these, they'll just hire someone who's good at math to give them the answer (which, as it turns out, is 50/50).  The problem is, they're confronted with these questions every day without ever knowing it.  The paper tells us that the number of dropouts in Home County has doubled every year since the consolidation in 1990.  No one bats an eye.  Store A provides a coupon good for an additional 25% off on pants already on sale for 30% off, whereas Store B has the same pants on sale for 50% off.  People who buy at Store A think they've saved money.  A group in art class makes a scale model of a building using the same materials they'll use for the one 10 times as tall, note that the model weighs 3 pounds, then are befuddled when 4 of them together can't lift the final project.

In early Mesopotamia, unscrupulous individuals would offer parcels of land for trade that had the same perimeter as the land they wanted, but much smaller area.  A knowledge of geometry was vital if you wanted to avoid being swindled.  Anyone who plays poker without knowing how to calculate rudimentary odds is giving away his money to those of us who believe math IS important in everyday life.  Buying a house or renting an apartment, buying or leasing a car, investing in stocks or savings bonds, choosing a line at the supermarket and a thousand other daily chores are easier and more likely to lead to the outcome you want if you are comfortable with and know how to use some relatively simple mathematics.

We're not teaching kids the Pythagorean Theorem because we believe they'll be in a situation someday where they will need to know the straight line distance between Juan's house and Julie's, which is 4 blocks east and 9 blocks north of Juan's.  We're teaching them those things because in their job as District Sales Rep for BigCo., Inc., they'll be much better salespeople if they have been trained to examine problems analytically, and look for solutions using the tools they have in their arsenal.  High school isn't a trade school.  They may never again, after high school, ponder the morality of Jean Valjean or the empathy of Atticus Finch.  They'll certainly never be quizzed on them.  But they WILL be better equipped to make judgments about criminal punishment and racial inequities – things they will certainly face in the real world.  A similar reality exists for mathematics education, even if some math professors haven't figured it out.