Math Ain’t Gonna Get me Down

Math and I have had a love/hate relationship through the years. Back in high school, it was my most feared subject. It was like another language to me and I always felt like it took far longer than my peers to conceptualize. In the rear-view mirror, I probably wasn’t giving myself enough credit. But as I’ve gone through life, I’ve noticed that the entire human race divides themselves into “math people” and “non-math people”. I often hear, “Oh I’m not a math person.” Obviously, we all have a serious existential question to answer here people, are we on the inside or the outside? As you’ll see in the following examples, I firmly fit into the “I try” bucket. I try vehemently and with gusto. And lucky for all of you, most of it has been clearly documented for generations to come.

The first use case is the restaurant or service tip scenario. They have made this quite easy nowadays as they figure it out for you, as illustrated by the handy chart pictured below.

Everytime I find myself in a salon situation where there is a girl young and full of hope at the front desk, she asks me how much I want to tip. I tell her 20% to test the waters and see what she’s made of. Inevitably the phone calculator comes out and she says “I’m not good at math.” That’s my cue!!! Here is my opportunity to give back to the human race as I quickly demystify the situation. My mom taught me long ago that you just move the decimal one spot to the left, round it out and double it. I think that’s something everyone can get behind. Unfortunately, when I share this life-changing information, she doesn’t seem as enthused.

The real opportunity to showcase my skills was when my kids wanted LED lights in their bedrooms. I bought the cadillac brand with tons of app functionality, but the trick was you couldn’t cut them to size. How exciting! A constraint to get around! You had to find a pattern that could work with the layout of the room; no shortcuts allowed. An engineer I would become! The below image illustrates what I like to call “the schematic”.

Some of my favorite highlights here are the bed and the window representation. I also like the notation of the “outliers” which clearly shows the serious statistical analysis at play. Unfortunately, I think what puts me firmly in the “non math person” camp is that it took at least 6 hours spread amongst 5 days to figure this out, amid much eye rolling from my kids. I tried to showcase that this was “math in action.” I told them that they should take note for the future, but for some reason they didn’t see the glory in it.

The most recent math challenge revealed itself as we went to hang lights in our new outdoor cabana.

This was yet another thrilling opportunity to bust out the proverbial protractor and get going. Here was the layout produced over several days of intensive thought on the back of my M&T envelope:

I’d like to draw attention to some highlights once again. To the left of the upper right hand corner, you’ll see a rectangle with curtain like adornments. Those were obviously worthly of further examination and became the zoom in figure below. It was crucial to find the hypotenuese of the right angle at play. I didn’t remember how to do it, but I rememered it was a thing and there are plenty of math formulas out there to help.

Also of interest during this project was when I began to excitedly realize that I could figure out drape measurements where the lights hung lower by finding a circumference. I think that was the point where my husband Jay intervened and proposed that maybe there’s a simpler way. “I think you can cut the lights becuase they aren’t in series.” Surrender was tough but probably valid at this point. I think he just saw the train wreck in front of him and decided we just had to get this done. Everything turned out ok as you can see below.

Maybe it’s more about the two camps of the human race to either “get shit done” or “overanalyze everything.” I know for certain I’m in the second group, and need a reality check from time to time. I’m sure there will be many more math adventures to come!