For the love of maths.

Image is copyrighted to Red Cross

The populations P1 and P2 of two cities are given by the formulae

P1 = 10000 e ^{k t}
P2 = 20000 e ^{0.01 t}
where k is a constant and t is the time in years with t = 0 corresponding to the year 2000. Find constant k so that the two populations are equal in the year 2020 and approximate your answer to 3 decimal places.


I know of at least one savant who pops by my blog and recently, he emailed me a whole essay about his thoughts on life. From math, science and the arts, it is really interesting to read and digest the bit of whatever is going through his mind and one topic really got the blogging bug in me going. Which is his love for math and why everyone has to learn to solve maths questions like the equation above. Hell yea I have no idea what the solution is (: Further fueled by the Additional Mathematics book on my cousin's table, I thought I shall do a topic on this.    

Image is copyrighted to Red Cross

To start off, lets not even go into details of why the education system in Singapore is such a 'failure' in  which I will leave it for another post. Lets talk about myself. Yes me.
In my secondary school as some of you fondly remember, mathematics killed me. I never got a hold of the Xs and Ys of maths and as much as we were supposed to 'be their friends,' I hated them to the core. I was the first person to walked out of my Additional Mathematics class and when I did walk out on that faithful day, I felt like a person cured of cancer. I could still remember my teacher's shocked face or maybe she was rejoicing when I did and the sky in Singapore has never been prettier as I headed down to the library. 


Before photography, my dad has this insane idea that I had to take Additional Mathematics and all the math in the world as I had to 'follow his footsteps' and become a mechanic/ automation engineer. I have nothing against that profession just that I have absolutely no interest of having the phrase 'like father, like daughter' thrown into my face. Influenced by Jean's crazy rock and roll jams and H and S's classical symphony, my life revolved around music instead of solving quadratic equations and finding the X of the question. 


Besides music, I really do not see how finding the axis of a symmetry is going to help me to sleep better or live life to the fullest. 
Fess up. How many of you actually heard of the axis of a symmetry or make use of the simultaneous equations to run your daily life?


Flipping through my cousin's Additional Mathematics textbook, there were circled questions, highlighted notes and solutions furiously scribbled by the side of whatever space left in it. He is a hard worker but I guess it runs in the family that he has been failing it.


To me, I agree and understand that math is important. However, I feel that only the arithmetic side of math is needed while the rest of the exponential and logarithm 'math' equations can be left to those who are really interested in solving them.


It would be great if the education system has an option for us to opt into either arithmetic or mathematics where those calculator pushing and math lover can actually find their polynomials to their hearts content and let them be taught by teachers who actually love that subject. 
I am pretty sure that the rest of us are pretty happy knowing how much 20% means at a discount, how much is one third, what the RMB, YEN and USD rates are for the day and how to count the rhythm of notes in music. In fact, what this country really needs are communications skills like languages or the EQ side of life and not some head banging X, open bracket 34 x 28 square to the power of cube root to the power of many powers, close bracket.


Ending of with one of my favorite quote by Noru while he was trying to encourage me to like mathematics:


Math is just like sex
Subtract the clothes,
Add the bed,
Divide the legs
and Pray you don't multiply.