March 24, 2007
The memory of Baby Boomers may be the only thing that saves the lost art of manually finding a square root. Some of us remember how. Some of us could care less. I am in the latter group.
Regardless of whether you like math or not, Baby Boomers remember how to do it.
You may remember more about eighth grade math than you think, and you can probably do it without a calculator. You can figure percentage, solve long division problems and know what a remainder is. You can recite quite a few multiplication tables, recall a little something about “casting out nines”, and know “pi” (3.14) the number that goes on forever.
Ask your kids and grandkids to sit down with a piece of paper and pencil and try and to solve a square root problem or even a long division one without their calculators. Well, let us just say I am betting on you.
Do not get me wrong, I am not waxing poetic or becoming romantic about numbers although many folks do. Granted, there is a certain beauty in numbers.
However, as I recall from my college days, budding journalists like myself were notorious for disliking math and avoiding it at all costs. Therefore, it did my heart good recently to hear a college dean mention that journalism students have not changed much. Apparently, they still function best on the language side of their brains where no math problems abide nor are wanted by we writer types.
I must confess though that I can actually remember an eighth grade math definition of “square root”, which is this: “the square root of a number is another number that when multiplied by itself gives you the first number.
Do not get too impressed here because I am merely talking about finding the square root of a simple number such as “16”. That is easy enough; the answer is 4 because 4 times itself gives you the first number, 16. One can do this with any number one wants, but I hate to tell you the bad news--only a few numbers like 16 work out so nicely. To find the square root of most numbers, one can keep the decimal places going for as long as one likes, but I cannot imagine why one would want to do that.
There are those among us though who love math so much that they celebrate math holidays such as March 14, also know to “pi” lovers as 3.14. Get it?
That is over the top for me as I still have horrific memories of eighth-grade math word problems.
By the time I finished reading those long word problems back then, I was positively worn out and ready for PE over “pi” any day.
You remember those tricky problems of which I speak:
A passenger train leaves the Philadelphia train depot 2 hours after a freight train from Boston leaves the same depot. The freight train is traveling 20 mph slower than the passenger train. Find the rate of each train, if the passenger train overtakes the freight train in three hours.
No!
My brain does not work this way.
Eventually, I learned that where the freight train originally came from had absolutely nothing to do with solving the problem.
I am afraid I am like the chef who said to his helper, “You take two thirds of water, one third of cream, one third of broth…”
The apprentice replied, “But that makes four thirds already!”
“Well,” said the chef, “Just get a bigger pot!”
Makes perfect sense to me.
Who needs a calculator?
