Times I Have Actually Used Math Since High School

Photograph by Baona  Getty
Photograph by Baona / Getty

My family and I are at an amusement park when a large crowd suddenly surrounds us. I frantically reach for my children—are they still here?! I count them: one, two. They are both here. Thank God for math.

The local grocery store offers an annual membership for fifteen dollars, which would qualify me for a ten-per-cent discount each month. I quickly write out an equation to determine if the program is worth enrolling in. It is. But apparently you are not allowed to write equations on the walls of the grocery store, and I have to pay for new walls. This is incredibly expensive. I should not have gotten this membership.

My husband, Tad, and I are celebrating our wedding anniversary. I buy him a cake in the shape of the number seven, which upsets him because it is our ninth anniversary. I remind him that I don't count the two boring years. He gets angry. I tell him that the number of boring years happens to be the smallest prime number, a fact that is sure to cheer anyone up. He is not cheered up. Tad yells at me that I only talk about math. I am not upset, though, because I embrace the cold, rigid truth of numbers.

My college roommate Samantha and I plan to meet in our favorite city, Chicago, even though Samantha lives in Paris and I live in Boston. If my train leaves Boston at 4 P.M. going ninety miles per hour, and Samantha's train leaves Paris at 3 P.M. going eighty-five miles per hour, at what time do we both arrive in Chicago? I got this wrong because I assumed Samantha was in the glorious city of Paris, Texas. Turns out she lives in Paris, France, and needed to fly on a plane. I guess I didn't know her as well as I thought. I hope she has a nice life.

Tad is speaking very loudly, using wild gesticulation. I draw a graph with a line whose integral represents his growing anger; it is identical to the line denoting my confusion. "Do you even care about our kids?!" Tad exclaims. I show him my work. "It's like you're not even listening to me," he says. I circle my answer: 32.7 rage units. "You make me livid," he screams, confirming my answer. We break up. I am sad, but I applaud myself for being correct.

My boss calls me in for my performance review. Suddenly, he thrusts a calculator in my hand. I gasp. It is a TI-84. I know exactly what to do with this. Quickly, I punch in the equation for a standard hyperbola. Easy-peasy! Turns out, I misunderstood him. He just wanted to know what numbers to plug in so it would say "BOOBS" upside down. I explain that you can't spell "BOOBS" on a TI-84 because of the font. He lets me go, disappointed.

I run home to find that Tad has packed my things into cardboard boxes. "Whoa," I say. He looks at me with a tiny flicker of hope. "You know, for a polyhedron like this cube," I go on, picking up a box of my dirty laundry and photos, "you can let F be the number of faces, V be the number of vertices, and E the number of edges, and you will always get F + V - E = 2." He slams the door in my face, squishing one of the boxes. "Good thing this formula works for any polyhedron that doesn't intersect itself," I shout, picking up some old wedding photos that fell from the crushed box.

Sad and surrounded by regular hexahedrons, I absentmindedly walk to the grocery store, where I learn that today is my ten-per-cent-discount day! Newly energized, I race to buy three bottles of my favorite food, pasta sauce. I feel like a new woman. Skipping on my way out, I trip and accidentally break a jar, splattering the sauce against a wall in the shape of a parabola with the equation = 0.2_x2 + 0.35_x - 1 that has its vertex at (–0.875, –1.2) and its focus at (–0.875, 0.09). It looks like a smile. I love math. I pay for new walls again.