Seeming useless math can be applied if you look for opportunities.

When I attended military training for sergeant rank, there was a land navigation part. Plot the grid coordinates on a map, use a protractor to figure out the angles, which you then aim the compass towards and count paces to find the points out in the woods. I realized these made triangles and said fuck a protractor. I used trigonometry instead. Figured out the lengths of the sides of the triangles from the grid coordinates, then used those lengths and tangent to figure out the compass angle and distance. The instructors had no clue what I was doing. Took first place in that course because the other person I was tied with only found 3 out of 4 points in his two tries at landnav.

The best math skill for everyday life has to be dimensional analysis, though. Want to figure out how expensive it is to drive per hour? Well, you’ve got miles/hour, dollars/gallon, and miles/gallon. This can get you to dollars/hour by just canceling out the units. (I don’t have a paper to write things down but I think this is correct)

dollars/gallon X gallons/mile X miles/hour = dollars/hour

You can use dimensional analysis to convert all sorts of things. It’s awesome.

Yeah I know it’s the shitpost community but math is pretty cool.

I constantly use algebra/calc and graph data for my stem job. Everyone should have a similar base of knowledge. I don’t complain that I learned about the Mongolian empire or read Of Mice and Men.

Unfortunately, the people thinking they don’t need to know stuff are also the people “doing their own research” on vaccines and such.

Learning stuff doesn’t just impart knowledge, it rounds out your understanding of what you don’t know and where you should yield to expertice which is arguably equally as important as knowing stuff.

I use maths playing video-games to optimise stuff, maths is everywhere

“Another day has passed and I still haven’t used the notion that the height of something on a slope is equal to the horizontal distance from the start of the slope times the steepness of the slope plus the initial height of the slope off the ground.” I swear people treat math as something you explicitly need to sit down and write the equations for to get any use out of instead of just, like, them being useful to make you a more logical, well-rounded thinker. It’s like thinking the sole point of reading Of Mice and Men in 8th grade is so that you can randomly recite quotes from it years later.

I used the Pythagorean theorem and trigonometry to score an ~800 m headshot in Arma 3. It was a lot of grid spaces away. Pythagorean theorem to get the hypotenuse, then trig to get the vertical offset.

Felt like a math sniper badass when I hit the shot the first time.

My bro that never used a bridge, stairs, gone into a building with unyielding faith that it won’t crash down just because, used a gps, rode a car, a plane, go into a freaking theme park ride, participate from the whole economic system: