Maths

      I might be a little distracted while writing this, I'm also watching Return of the Jedi. I'm writing a blog on maths while watching Star Wars; aren't I just the pinnacle of cool? Also I rewrote that sentence just so I could include a semi-colon. On the subject of my coolness many people think I'm uncool because of my love of maths. This is not true, I'm actually uncool because of my personality. But that's not the point, my point is most people enjoy maths, even if they can't stand numeracy.

      You may have heard that music is connected to maths, but you might not understand exactly how. The tuning used today in the West is known as equal temperament (as opposed to the outdated Pythagorean tuning, which is also interesting but a bit off topic) has a ratio between each note of 1:, which means if you do it 12 times (the number of notes in a Western octave) you get the 12th  root of 2 to the power of 12, which equals 2. So in a twelve note scale with ratio 1: the 12th note is twice the first note. There are also a bunch of other ratios involved in music. The point is that, unless you are actually tone deaf (which is rare), you can easily distinguish music that follows these ratios and music that does not which is how you know if something is in tune. What's more, you know these scales so well that you anticipate patterns and by either matching those patterns or deviating from them a musician can manipulate you to feel anything from the whole spectrum of human emotions. So really when you feel music you are just responding to a mathematical sequence.

      There are many other examples of the extraordinary everyday uses of maths, such as the complex trigonometry used to catch a ball, but my point is that just because you might not enjoy numeracy does not mean you do not enjoy maths, it might just mean you enjoy it in a different way.