Many comment threads get distracted with “what’s the value of a math degree” when in fact we’re talking about math as gateway not as end-result.

I find folly in bringing this discussion down to the cute and often meaningless pieces of paper we call degrees. Really, the value of learning math, real math with the horrors of multiplication tables, standard algorithms, and *gasp* right answers is that it introduces to the mind an entirely different way of considering the world. It’s a kind of disciplined outlook that produces things like airplanes, automobiles, and the internet.

So often, by teaching “math appreciation” in place of math in our schools we rob kids of the opportunity to experience this outlook. Instead, we fill them with the idea like “any answer is the right one so long as you explain how you got there”. Then, later, when they encounter real math for the first time they hate it because it’s unfamiliar and unforgiving.

At this point, they are cut off from understanding so much of the world, from the sciences to the inner workings of music. They not only don’t have the knowledge to understand them, they don’t have or appreciate the mindset needed to understand them.

What happened to all the “men’s studies departments” all over the continents? How about a title IX for gender studies for equal spending on men and women? Let women’s studies be devastated like men’s sports were by title IX. All those Olympics medals lost for lack of training. All those men who never went to college so women could get tiddly wink scholarships.

Gotta luv it.

Business degrees are highly math-intensive. That really should be obvious, particularly from your first example. How would math help an investment banker? Why, what an excellent question. How, indeed, might math help someone whose job is essentially running the numbers?

However, this is nothing new. University faculty will proudly brag about their own math ignorance.

I haven’t really used any math more sophisticated than arithmetic since I took calc in college, but I don’t think there’s such a thing as the English v. math dichotomy people like to lay claim to. I always have math geniuses in my AP Lit course.

I liked math, but had problems with the extreme conceptual stuff, so after problems with Calculus of Real Variables (senior level college math), I eventually went into engineering, which was much more fun from my perspective.

In response to Kate, yes, many card counters banned from casinos were math majors. I knew one who put herself through college by winning in casinos using card counting.

As for other fields of endeavor, statistics is frightfully useful for any scientific experiment in fields ranging from climatology to economics to plant genetics. I always wished I had taken more statistics. Even my wife had to learn basic statistics for her Ed.D. degree.