ou currently have over half of a semester’s experience learning about statistics. Take a moment to think about statistics, everyday life, and your future career. How does statistics influence your everyday life? How can statistics be useful for your future career? My career will be in Social Work.
Exploring the world of numbers is one of the topics that interested me regarding liberal math. Notably, this came to be after watching a video on computers and binary codes. Comprehending the world of numbers, particularly regarding computers and binary codes, is intriguing. While the concept of 1 + 1 = 2 may appear simple, exploring the complexities of binary coding unveils the fundamentals of digital computing. Computers process information using binary code composed of ones and zeros (Logue et al., 2019). It serves as a reminder of how straightforward many sophisticated technology systems are. Whether in computers or mathematics, the tale of numbers relates to the underlying ideas that shape the digital world. This voyage reveals the grace and accuracy inherent in the language of numbers, providing a greater understanding of the technical wonders we come across daily.
Personal Finance: Investing and Saving
Regarding personal finance, various dimensions can be highlighted as crucial in an individual’s life. Personal finance touches on many aspects, including investing, saving, and budgeting. Regarding saving, I learned that saving is a function of income that relies heavily on an individual’s consumption. However, from personal experience, saving should be done at all income levels. One controversial aspect of personal finance I discovered is the ability to balance saving and investing. Whereas saving is risk-free, it is not profitable in the end.
On the contrary, investing has a reward of profit but carries significant risks. Notably, this is where I realized the importance of personal finance management and the use of liberal math. One must do balanced calculations to establish the part of income that can be channeled to investing or saving. It is the place where budgeting comes into play. It entails planning to use available financial resources (Goyal et al., 2021). Through liberal math and budgeting, one can manage personal finances effectively and ultimately make profits.
To Infinity… And Beyond!
Another aspect to reflect on regarding Math for liberal arts is using the Tower of Hanoi. It is an aspect of infinity, and beyond that, it is pretty intriguing. The recursive structure of the Tower of Hanoi problem’s solution is elegant and theoretically fascinating. The ‘toh’ function effectively divides the problem into smaller subproblems and approaches, each using a similar methodology. The base case anchored the recursion, which dealt with the situation when there was just one disk. The function does a great job of capturing the reasoning for transporting N disks via an auxiliary rod from the source rod to the destination rod. The function’s print statements were essential for displaying the disks’ sequential motions. Watching how the algorithm worked its way through various rod combinations to arrive at the desired outcome was fascinating. An additional degree of complexity was introduced to the problem by the requirement to maintain the sequence of disk sizes and the fact that a larger disk cannot be stacked on top of a smaller one. The exponential character of the problem was brought to light by the temporal complexity of O(2^N), underscoring the significance of practical algorithms when working with more extensive disk sets. This experience strengthened my appreciation for the beauty concealed in seemingly tricky problems like the Tower of Hanoi and demonstrated the effectiveness and adaptability of recursive techniques in problem-solving.
References
Goyal, K., Kumar, S., & Xiao, J. J. (2021). Antecedents and consequences of personal financial management behavior: A systematic literature review and future research agenda. International Journal of Bank Marketing, 39(7), 1166-1207.
Logue, A. W., Douglas, D., & Watanabe-Rose, M. (2019). Corequisite mathematics Remediation: Results over time and in different contexts. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 41(3), 294-315.