5 Interesting Ways We Use Math in Everyday Life

Whether you’re really good at math or you think that you might have a “math disability“, you’re going to be forced to use math whether you like it or not. There’s so much math in everyday life that it’s almost inescapable.

Here are 5 of the most interesting ways math ends up in everyday life.

1. Cooking

If you’re interested in cooking or baking anything more complicated than toast or microwave pizza rolls, you’re going to have to deal with mathematics.

Since most recipes are based on a given quantity of servings, if your family is smaller or larger than the size the recipe is for, you’ll need some math. Adding fractions, multiplying cook times, and converting between units can be complicated if you don’t understand math well.

Cooking also requires you to understand some basic elements of chemistry, especially in baking. Dough rises because of chemical reactions. If you understand how yeast, baking soda, and baking powder work, you can make something that’s not usually fluffy much fluffier or a dense food less dense.

If you need to replace or substitute an item, you’ll find math can come in handy. If you need to replace an egg with applesauce, you’ll find that you need to know the general volume of an egg and account for the chance with applesauce.

To get better at fractions, check out the tools that CalcuNation offer for free.

2. Design

Whether you’re talking about interior design, building a house, or designing a logo, you’re going to need to know a lot of math. Design usually entails geometry, relationships between points, angles, and math for scaling an image down.

If you’re designing for a space inside a home, you’ll have to do a lot of diagramming and measuring. This can become complicated if you’re filling the space with objects or furniture that is measured in another unit than the one you’re using. If you’re measuring in feet, a 150 cm sofa might seem like it’s relatively big, until you get it in the home.

For anyone designing a logo for a brand or a company, without a cursory knowledge of geometry, you might have trouble with the round or angular logo. You’ll need a little bit of math in your corner to help out.

If you’re taking on the task of building a house or getting interested in architecture, you’ll definitely need to know math. You can build a house that’s big and takes up a lot of space without accounting for volume at all. An unnecessarily complicated structure could have little to no room for people once it’s finished.

3. Shopping

Whether you’re shopping for fun things like clothing or making a family budget for groceries, you’ll need to know a fair amount of math to make smart decisions.

When you’re out shopping, you’re sure to be offered one deal after another for buying one, getting another for a certain percentage off. You could eve see that the discounts increase as you purchase more. However, without some cursory math skills, you might not know if you’re getting a better deal than at another place having no sales.

When you’re shopping for groceries, you need to account for buying per pound, per unit, or buying in bulk. Every choice you make could have a different result in how much you end up paying. When you’re buying vegetables, often you’re offered a packaged version that’s sold per pound or a washed and cut version sold by the package.

This is when your math skills will need to kick in and tell you whether or not you’re getting as good of a price as you think.

4. Managing Finances

Whether you’re saving, investing, or taking out a loan, you’ll need to use math to make sure you don’t overspend. There’s a reason that financial institutions spend so much money on hiring staff with strong math skills. The better you understand mathematics and percentages, the more money you can make.

When you calculate both simple and compound interest on a loan, you might find that you need to repay on a different schedule. A loan with a smaller interest rate might be charging you on compound interest while another with a larger rate doesn’t. If you’re not paying back your loans in the right order, you could be throwing away your money.

Math is important when it comes to investing as well. If you watch the way that an investment has grown over time, you can see what has been made by other investors. You’ll also need to calculate how much you can make based on mathematic projections of how much the investment is projected to make.

Knowing how your money could grow is completely based on your understanding of mathematics.

5. Traveling

When you’re traveling around the world or driving to visit friends or family, you’ll have to know some math to calculate arrival times and distances. If you have the option to take a train or a bus in a foreign country, you’ll need to know math for conversion rates.

Driving a long distance requires that you know the mileage of your car, how much gas costs in each state, and how many miles you need to travel. You’ll also need to consider how many miles it is to get there versus how fast the speed limit is. Taking side roads a shorter distance could take longer if the speed limits are considerably different.

When you’re in a foreign country, you’re going to be traveling across time zones and will need to calculate arrival times based on time differences. Then when you’re trying to buy a sandwich, you’ll need to understand conversion rates to know if you’re overspending or not.

Don’t Fear Math in Everyday Life

Before you read this article, you probably casually used math in countless ways through your day. The math in everyday life is so pervasive that it would be impossible to try to live without it. You might as well embrace it!

If you happen to be great at math, think about the ways you could be using code to improve your life.

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