From abstract to everyday life: how mathematics is everywhere even if we do not use it

Often it is heard that Mathematics is everywherebut we are rarely perceived its presence. Still, it plays a fundamental role in ours daily lifefrom the organization of the routine to the design of the spaces that surround us, from art to design, influencing proportions, symmetries and perspectives. Despite its practical application, mathematics remains an abstract concept of nature and precisely this characteristic allows it to describe and understand the real world in a universal and effective way.

Mathematics is everywhere, but why don’t we see it?

There mathematics It can be seen everywhere, in fact it is precisely from nature that the intuition of its “existence” comes! Historically, mathematics is inspired by the world that surrounds us. An example? The concept of circle was also inspired by the album of the moon, Which has always been visible by men, well before the circle was called mathematically.

Even if we don’t pay attention, a great variety of objects that we are dealing with daily It is made using mathematical knowledge in the design or implementation phase. This is true for both objects concrete like cell phones, bridges and cars, both for the world digital which is based on one numerical representation of information processed in a mathematical way.

Finally, all sciences use mathematics to measure, describe, resolve problems and elaborate theories. We have to think about the mathematics as a language: it is the language that all the sciences speak! And it is thanks to mathematics if we manage to describe, understand And interpret What happens around us.
Every time we use a scientific result we are actually taking advantage of the fruits of a job based on mathematics: even when we take medicine!

However, despite this widespread diffusion of mathematics in our world and in our society, we rarely perceive its presence And we almost never use it consciously in everyday life, unless we carry out specific professions such as that of the engineer, or of the scientific researcher.

Mathematics in daily life is (almost) useless

Let’s imagine buying x eroded of bread where x At the second it is worth 4. It sounds strange, right? In fact, nobody uses the equations in the daily routine To do things like eating, sleeping, tidying up etc.: only the hypothesis of doing it seems strange to us, if not ridiculous.

Sometimes it is said that “shopping” is an activity in which mathematics is used, but is it really the case? In fact, no! In fact, without using any mathematical notion, we can take the products from the supermarket shelf and at the case the account is automatically processed so we must not make sums, finally if we pay with the ATM, we must not even count the money.
Of course, it can be useful to have a little familiarity with the Four operations To evaluate in advance how much we will spend, but we can always use the calculator of the mobile phone, without the need to know how to do calculations in mind.

For cooking it may be useful to have some notions on fractions And proportions: for example, to adapt to 6 people a recipe that is written for 4 people we will have to increase the quantities proportional, dividing by 4 and multiplying by 6. The same type of skill can be useful for the dosage of medicines so as to relate them to the body weight of the person to whom they must be administered.

Even during the sales You come across mathematics, do you know? Oh yes, because a particular type of proportion is the calculation of percentages which can be used to calculate the price of a discounted product, or to check that the discount has been applied correctly.
There are other examples of mathematical notions that we can meet in our life (e.g. statistics, Cartesian graphicsetc.), but we can live quietly without mathematical knowledge that go beyond the classic knowing how to accountwhich, however, once represented the maximum frontier of mathematical knowledge.

This “does not need” to use mathematics in daily real life is not strange, because the mathematics It is yes everywhere, in everything we do, in the sense that it describes it and is an integral part of it! But this does not mean that we must actively use it. There is a difference between the fact that mathematics helps us to read and build the world around us and how we interact with the concrete, real world. Let’s try to understand better.

The real world and the geometric world

The forms of the world around us can be described through geometry. But there is a geometric concept that makes us understand the difference between theory (mathematics) and “practical” (nature): a geometric point has the characteristic of being unioxonalin essence if we imagine we zoom it we will never see it enlarged, we can increase the zoom as we want, but the point will always remain an infinitely small thing. On the contrary, if we try to zoomed a point designed on a sheet with your cell phone, we will see it enlarged.

The mathematical concept of point is not linked to a specific concrete situation and refers to different types of “points” that we meet in our daily life: for example, if we meet in a square, it will be enough to find ourselves a couple of meters away for consider ourselves at the same point of the square, but if two trucks that travel from Rome to Milan stop in the same service station we consider them at the same point as the route even if they are parked 50 meters away from each other. In the real life a point can have size different, but when we talk about point we understand each other even without the need to specify how big the point must be, as if it were not size, unioxonal like the geometric point. We are actually using amathematical abstraction of the concept of point.

Similarly, one geometric fee it is not the same as concrete, real fees: nobody ever really has to do with a straight line tipmuch less infinity. In the mathematical world we could walk on a straight line forever, in the real one not, both because the concrete fees all have an end, and because the time we have available is over. However we can use the abstract concept Of lift To imagine, design and create concrete things such as houses, roads, interstellar travels!

Mathematics as a tool: how to go from abstraction to reality

In short, as we have seen, mathematics are hardly used in everyday life, even if it is present everywhere! We must not know it to be able to use it, it is enough that someone before us has understood it, used and interpreted To describe the nature and objects we use. In fact, it is necessary to have the tools to pass from the abstract world of mathematics – where for example the points are nothing but positions, but materially there are no – to the real world of nature – where the points are real and can be seen, but can be described by mathematics, so as to be studied!

Be able to make the world around us written in the form of symbols And mathematical functions, makes it interpretable, and therefore understandable.