Lets talk maths and stats

Who's scared of maths? Its a common thing really, but that's our job not yours. So lets look quickly (we can skip over the scary bits) at what maths really is and why its useful to everyone that can breathe.

Maths is the science of numbers and kids meet it in school with basic counting, algebra and geometry. I have a serious problem with how its taught and even why we have schools, but I will avoid this argument for now. Lets look at the basic building blocks of what maths really is.

If I have two apples, I can share them with my friend and we each have one apple to enjoy. Makes sense? That's a discussion of sharing with friends but its also a solution to a maths equation. What I wrote out in the sentence above can be translated into universal symbols that mathematicians can interpret back into the above sentence. Same as gran-ma's knitting really. And that's what maths is, folks!

The branches of pure maths starts with the building blocks of basic counting and numerical interpretation. Arithmetic is adding and subtracting. Algebra is the same but sometimes we don't know all the values, so we use letters like X as placeholders. Geometry and trigonometry deal with shapes and the relationship between the sides of a solid object.

Higher maths starts to get a bit more abstract but it builds on the base of pure maths. Pattern theory is the same as art in the sense that you can look at an artwork and see balance or not. Calculus shows us the way to handle continuous changes such as a wave crashing on a boulder. Polynomials are algebraic equations raised to an abstract level.

So now that we have a basic grasp of maths, what is statistics? In its simplest description, if we have a known set of historic data, we can make certain assumptions about future data. So for example, if a lottery produces the number 57 on average 40 times in the last year of weekly draws, its a good chance that 57 is going to be a winning number in the future. In statistical terms, that number has a fairly high probability of being drawn. So if you were to see this pattern, choosing 57 each week is a way to statistically increase your likelihood of pulling winning numbers.

Statistical analysis involves probabilities, goodness-of-fit between two or more sets of data or diverse concepts such as polling data. At a much more in-depth level, the entire realm of pension calculations way into the future, is based on all manner of detail relating to life expectancy.