Architects and geometry teachers? How about every single engineer, mechanic or person with a similar job. How about physicists. How about medical doctors? You obviously have no idea what you can apply geometry to.

A good understanding of geometry goes a long way in understanding statistics.

Standard deviation seemed magical when I first learned about it. The formula was easy to apply. It’s just plugging in numbers, after all. With a simple example, it shouldn’t be too hard to see that it does what you want it to do (measure how things are scattered about the mean, or in other words, how they deviate from the mean). It seemed to come out of nowhere, though. Why is this particular formula used to measure deviation? There are others at our disposal. Why not one of them? It wasn’t until I read an article in which the standard deviation was given a geometric interpretation that it really made sense, and that this was in fact the right formula to use.

More recently, I taught a first year undergraduate linear algebra course. One of the topics was linear regression. This was another thing that was simply presented with no explanation. The formulas as they are usually presented are ugly and, like the one for standard deviation, mysterious. In this course, it was presented in the context of linear algebra, but most of the explanations were geometrical. Although the formulas could be derived completely without mention of any geometry, it helps a lot to see why these formulas are used when a geometric interpretation is given. (the formula can also be presented more compactly when the machinery of linear algebra is used).

And beside this fact one third of all managers today are mathematics or physicists, you get told this when beginning to study one ot these.

Mathematics are not the working bees and they never have been, they intelligence would just be wasted.

I think you are confusing “math whiz” with something else — I’m not sure exactly
what. Very few “math whizzes” end up as “worker bees.” They end up as research
physicists, actuaries, engineers, doctors, lawyers, chemists, etc…

If you are going to post a tirade on correct grammar, make sure your
spelling is correct.

The main difference between these and geometry is that you have to think harder in geometry, and mathematics in general.

Don’t you think bagging groceries has at least a little bit of a geometrical flavour to it? After all, much of the stuff you buy comes in a box in the shape of a rectangular prism or a can in the shape of the cylinder. How do you arrange the boxes and cans in such a way as to minimize the number of bags used? This may seem trivial or insignificant, and your high school geometry class may not have been of any help, but problems like this (optimal packing problems) are the stuff of active research. On a larger scale, when you’re shipping large amounts of goods over large distances, you want it to be done in the most efficient way. That’s not so trivial, since shipping costs are ultimately passed on to the consumer. You also want the trucker to have some geometric intuition. If the driver doesn’t estimate the turning radius properly, the truck could get stuck. I’ve seen it happen.

I’m biased. Mathematics is my bread and butter. When I tell people what I do, they often come back to me with stories about how the mathematics that they learned in high school, which seemed useless at the time, is now relevant. Not everything is going to be relevant to everyone, but much of it is relevant to someone. I could even think of ways that geometry is relevant to each of business, psychology, art history, humanities….

Granted, the info is from 2006, but I think it’s recent enough for this forum. If any further detail is needed, there’s always the U.S. Census Website.

Oh, and nice use of vocabulary. I love esoteric. Mostly because it’s become somewhat esoteric itself. =P

I think this one belongs on the failblog.

If you had a real job or a real life, it would be different.

As an English teacher of mine once remarked to a particularly unmotivated student, “… still sucking the vapid pap of ignorance, I see.”

if, however, you recognize the utility of all knowledge, esoteric or otherwise, to be strength-training for your brain and aiding in helping you understand your place in this complex universe, then you might just be on your way to becoming a decent human being.

Student FAIL.

If people can’t remember what they were taught from 3rd to 6th grade, they don’t deserve to make a salary that’s anyshere near “average” anyway.