It's More Than Just a Free Minor

So now that May is almost over, I suppose that it is time for another blog post. Again, apologies to all that actually check this.

So here is something that I have been thinking about recently: Math. But you might be saying, "Brian, you just graduated. Why in the world would you be thinking about math?" and the answer to your question is simple: Math is everything.

Music is math: When you convert the frequency of equivalent notes between octaves, they are an exact double of the lower octive. For example, if you were to take the A note just above middle C to be 440 Hz, then the A below it would be 220 Hz and the one above it would be 880 Hz. Each note is thusly proportionally spaced (A to A# to B to B# and so on) to be 2^(1/12)x the note preceding it. All of this is simply boiled down to the rate at which waves propagate through matter, but then there have been numerous papers written on the rhythmic patterns of Chopin, Motzart, and Beethoven, one of which takes Beethoven's fifth and pulls the raw equations out of it using Fourier transforms and demonstrates the mathematical soundness of the entire thing. If I could find the link on it right now, I would link it, but I'm not in the mood to go digging. On a less classy note, there's auto-tuning of today's horrible pop stars that makes their voices more tolerable: also math, but just less classy.

Weight loss is math: when you're trying to lose weight, it is going to come down to one thing: calories. A calorie is defined as the amount of energy it takes to heat one gram (which is also conveniently one milliliter and one cubic centimeter) of water, one degree C. This is stored energy and equal to about 4.184 joules. When you are actively using up this energy, you can express the rate of energy consumption in watts, or joules per second. So if the average person takes in 2000 dietetic calories (or 8.368 MJ) per day, they would have consumed enough energy to power a single 100 watt lightbulb for almost an entire day. Now, this really isn't all that much, but bear in mind that there are people that are consistently getting fatter, which means that they aren't using all the energy that they take in, and there body has to store it somewhere. Basic universal laws state that you can't create or destroy energy, only convert it between forms. So they are taking it in, nit using it, and then converting it to fat. Yup. So if you want to lose it, you have to use more energy in a day than you consume. E_out > E_in. Simple as that.

Motion is math: say that your standing on top of a building and drop a baseball off the top. The representation of the acceleration of the ball will just be a = g. Then to find the velocity at any given time, this is simply v = g*t, and then to find the position of the ball, you can integrate once more to find that x = .5 g*t^2. this is neglecting any drag forces that the air exerts on the ball and also just a simple drop. If you were to throw the ball with an initial velocity of 65 mph at an angle of 35 degrees from the horizontal with a cross wind of 30 mph off a 75 foot tall building, you could effectively calculate almost exactly where it would land. This same principle relates to anything that moves. You can use math to explain the lack of friction on old shoes coupled with a diagram showing the unequal forces causing one to slip while walking, or to show the devastation between a head-on collision between an F-150 and a smart car. In that scenario, you can guess who the victor is going to be, but can you explain why? Well, math can.

There are plenty more examples, but these are just a few that I could think of off the top of my head. So every time somebody says to me, "math is hard" I like to interpret this into "understanding everything is hard." Granted, you don't have to understand the math behind everything to do it, it just makes it a lot better.

(And this is what happens when I don't use my brain for a month after being out of school.)