3 Things I Love About Math

As a recent graduate with a BS in Applied Mathematics, I was recently challenged to explain why I like math. So here are the 3 things I love most about math:

1)     The way everything just comes together. To me nothing beats that moment when you can apply everything you know to a problem; properties, identities, formulas, and results. To take a complex problem and then transform it into a simple and elegant solution, no matter how complex or ugly the starting problem or intermediate steps may have been.

2)     The incredible utility of knowing math. The more I learn about math the more I can apply it in my everyday life. From resizing a recipe to calculating airflow requirements for a circulation system, to figuring out compound interest payments, all the way to figuring out the odds of winning a few bucks in the lottery. The more I learn about math the more I find ways to apply it and the more I find things I’d like to learn.

3)     The way problems are well structured and ordered. When I’m working on a problem, I love being able to “see the next step” so to speak. Seeing an expression in a certain form, I can say to myself “From here I should apply this formula to get it into the form I want.” Being able to step through a problem this way is something I find very satisfying, especially when at the end I can look back and see the clear progression from start to finish, and the clear, ordered steps I took to get there.