• Question: What is a mathematical concept that most people underestimate or overlook?

    Asked by Jack n Quinn to Sarah C, SamG, Samet, josephcameron, johneaston, Heather W, Ebrahim S on 9 Jun 2025.
    • Photo: John Easton

      John Easton answered on 9 Jun 2025:

      Random numbers. When people talk about random numbers, generally they don’t really want something that is truly random. What they want is a nice even distribution of “random” numbers over the range that they need.

      There are plenty of ways of generating truly random numbers, but in practice, people need something more structured (and hence you could argue that it’s not random at all)!!

    • Photo: Sam Gilbert

      Sam Gilbert answered on 16 Jun 2025:

      It has to be Algebra for me. I did not get this at school, not until I was doing my degree and I had a brilliant teacher who really connected the purpose for me, it is underestimated but it is the foundation of so much we do in daily life…..a great teacher is key here

Comments

  • Photo: kelvinrose

    kelvinrose commented on :

    As a water engineer – geometry is often quite useful. In particular, for designing pipelines, the equation for the area of a circle is used all the time!