It’s been said the Inuit have at least 12 different words to describe snow.
I used 40 different words to describe snow less than 10 minutes after I started shovelling it the other day!
Still, while you mindlessly shovel away, you may find, as I did, that you have plenty of time to meditate on aspects of life.
For some bizarre reason, that snowy day, I began to meditate on math, and the role it has played in my life.
Now math and I have had an uneasy, even adversarial relationship for many years.
When I was a teacher, (I did NOT teach math or science!) I always made my tests and exams out of even numbers. How else, otherwise, was I going to know who had actually passed?
Very early I gave up trying to do my own income tax, despite the booklets and (I quote) the “easy to follow instructions” included with the forms. I did try to do the calculations a couple of times. Honestly.
That stopped, however, the April I discovered, according to my math, that either the government owed me $58,000 or I was looking at serious jail time for tax fraud.
Now a professional does the tax math for me.
I force computers to balance my cheque books, manage my accounts, figure out my investment portfolio, dole out my pay cheques, sort my incoming and outgoing bills, regulate how much to tip and determine whether I can afford milk this week.
I work banking computers hard.
In fact, I’ve made the ATM at my local bank so annoyed that the last time I punched in my PIN number, it printed out a sheet that said “Go away” or a couple of words to that effect.
Real math is tough.
When a recipe gives you measurement amounts for two or four or six people, and I want to serve one or three or five, I can’t figure out by how much to reduce the liquids and dry ingredients. So I generally take a guess. Or I just toss everything in the packet into the pot at once.
(I don’t get a lot of return dinner guests.)
I don’t have much luck getting things like pictures and shelves correctly centred on walls. Every time I measure, the numbers come out differently, or they shift around. And then I can’t recall whether I started with the metric or the imperial system.
A calculator is one of the apps included on my cell phone. However, I am not certain what the mathematical symbols along the top are all supposed to do. And if you just push them randomly, strange things happen to the numbers and equations.
I may have proved string theory without knowing it.
No, I want to state that I have discovered a better way to approach math.
It’s my own number system.
This revolutionary form of science I choose to call creative mathematics.
This the kind of math you turn to, in life, when you are presented with specific number based questions.
I have included, below, several concrete examples of questions which, in my view, absolutely require my form of creative math:
What is your weight today?
What is your year of birth?
According to these stats, what is your body/mass index?
How many minutes do you exercise every day?
And the key question requiring an application of creative math?
Exactly what size were you looking for in bathing suits, Madame?
You see. My creative math is a godsend in the real world.
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