One topic that I found very interesting, personally, was the idea of thinking of a clock to be in modulo 12. Since there are 12 numbers that round the clock and there are 24 hours within our day we can think of the clock in such a way. We repeat 12 two times. I thought of an example that is super relevant in our daily lives as when you go on a driving trip. Say you leave the house at 4pm and it takes you 9 hours to get to your destination. How do we know what time it will be when we arrive to our destination? Well because of the way modulo works, we would say we’d arrive at 1am. 4+9=1 (mod 12) Anything that would equal zero would be either noon or midnight depending on when you started your trip! Thinking of modulo in this relevant light made it easier to understand.
Another topic that I found to be interesting is the idea of nature being lazy. The example found in the book refers to bubbles! No matter the shape of the bubble wand the bubble blown will always be a sphere. It’s odd that I have never wondered why, but this book shed light on just that. A sphere is the easiest shape to create due to the fact that a sphere takes the least amount of energy to create. This is because the sphere is the shape that has the smallest surface area that can contain that fixed amount of air. We have been trying for years to mimic nature’s effective sphere making abilities and finally were successful in 1783 when an English plumber, William Watts, realized that he could crack the code for nature’s tendency for spheres.
I would say overall the book was very informative and challenged my critical thinking abilities by pointing out obvious math in every day life that was not so obvious to me, such as the clock and bubble examples. I did enjoy reading this book due to my own curiosity of the significance of math in our day-to-day lives. I don’t know if I would say that all future or current teachers should read this book but I don’t think it would hurt at all. Seeing the relevance of random math is cool and could potentially help us when students ask the beloved question of, “Why does this matter?” but I am reluctant to say it is necessary for all teachers to read.
When we had our classroom share about the books we read I feel there were other books that portrayed relevance in different ways that oddly enough seemed more relevant than this unsystematic compilation of relevant math.