What is math?

          Whenever I tell people that I am a math major at Grand Valley, I typically hear the response of "What kind of job do you want to have when you graduate?" and honestly, I don't know. I have thought about this over and over and I still have not come up with a certain job or career field I want to get into. This past summer, the company that I have been working for got bought out by a major corporation. In our first meeting with some of the company executives, we went around and had to say what we did for the company. When it was my turn I said what I needed to and then added that I am also a full time student at Grand Valley. When asked what I was studying I told them I was a math major, and thats when they all looked at me with a sort of grin on their faces and one said "You're a number guy, I like that." Thats when it hit me, having a degree in math is extremely valuable to a business.           The major reason being, we know how to solve problem

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8... do you know what comes next? If you do you may have heard about Leonardo of Pisa also known as Fibonacci and his famous series. However, do you really know who Fibonacci actually was? Finding Fibonacci  by Keith Devlin explores who Fibonacci really was. Devlin writes in his book all about his research tactics on Fibonacci. He talks about his multiple trips to Spain and what he learned from reading Liber Abbaci written by Fibonacci. Liber Abbaci brought in the Hindu-Arabic number system into Europe and subsequently the entire world. Devlin does a great job when writing Finding Fibonacci . He uses a lot of personal experiences to captivate the reader and put the life of Fibonacci into perspective. For example in chapter 6, entitled Walk Along the Pisan Riverbank, Devlin recounts his walk along the riverbank in Pisa. He tells you about what he is seeing on his trip in 2003 and compares it to what Fibonacci may have seen back in the 13th century as he walked along the

Throughout history, there have been many different cultures doing math in many different ways. I would like to talk about a few of these and what they contributed to mathematics as a whole. I would first like to start with the Egyptians. The Egyptians were one of the first cultures to introduce a base 10 numeral system. They used different symbols to represent each multiple of 10. So there was one symbol for 1, a symbol for 10, a symbol for 100, and so on. You could write 10 using one symbol, but in order to write down 9, you would have to use 9 of the "1" symbols. This doesn't seem to bad, but when you get into the bigger numbers, there is a lot of writing for just one simple number. When we look at the ancient Mayans, we think of the Mayan Calendar. Their calendar ended in 2012 and people thought that this was going to be the end of the world. It consisted of 3 different calendars that were used simultaneously to find the correct date. This shows the high capability of

Math to me is the basis of all things. Math is in about everything we see and use on a daily basis. For instance, I use it when I'm driving to calculate my actual speed. My speedometer is off 5 mph so I have to use math to know how fast I am really going. Math is numbers. We can use addition and subtraction as well as other operations to alter the numbers. Math is also found in other areas of the sciences. Physicists use math all the time to figure out different things. I really don't know many milestones of mathematics but I will list what I can. I think one of the biggest milestones in math would be the invention of mathematical solving devices. From abacuses all the way up to equation solving softwares that we use today. Technology has definitely impacted mathematics in the fact that everything has gotten easier and faster to solve. This would make it to some of the "unsolvable" problems from back in the day can now be solved using technology. Another milestone wo