This is my favorite tweet of the moment, courtesy of Dan Meyer:
Back in July 2012, the New York Times published a terrible, ignorant, anti-intellectualism-spouted-by-a-so-called-intellectual opinion piece titled Is Algebra Necessary? It was penned by Andrew Hacker, an emeritus professor of political science (that should be your first warning) at Queens College, City University of New York. His thesis was that making math mandatory reduces our talent pool by discouraging “otherwise talented students who are impeded by algebra, to say nothing of calculus and trigonometry.” The horror!
Click the image to read the original article.
To their credit, the Times published a couple of follow-up pieces soon afterward: In Defense of Algebra and N Ways to Apply Algebra to the New York Times. However, they only truly atoned for their math sins a couple of days ago in a piece about how much money the movie The Interview made:
While Sony didn’t say how much of the $15 million made came from rentals and sales, anyone with eighth-grade algebra would realize that there’s enough information to figure it out. In these two paragraphs, you have two variables and two linear equations, which means you don’t need Sony to tell you how much of that $15 million came from sales and how much came from rentals.
To make your life easier, I’ve done the math for you:
So to answer the New York Times’ question, “Is algebra necessary?”, the answer is “Yes, and more often than you might think.”
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Please explain equation 3. I really don't gfet it and its throwing me off.
Good point, but please remember the condition number. Given round off on significant figures (assuming 2 not 1), the answers get a little more complicated, ranging from .96 million rentals to 2.4 million rentals and 22,000 to 640,000 sales.
Curt
In no way is that the only solution. The New York Times is right, there isn't enough information to figure out how many rentals vs. sales there were. For example, there could have been 100 sales, and 2,499,750 rentals.
And by 'right', I mean 'wrong'!
Curtis: You're right; I just wanted to avoid the confusion that might arise if I wrote "6" and "15" on one side, and "2 million" instead of "2 000 000" on the other. I've seen less math-y people get tripped up by that.
tk: Equation 3 is equation 1, multiplied by 6.
Alan and Curt,
Keep in mind that there were only 2M
total transactions e.g. total number of rentals plus total number of sales = 2M.
Both of your counterpoints seem to overlook this known variable. Anyone who actually knows alegebra, knows that to solve mult-variable problems then you've got to eork solve multiple equations concurrently. In this case, there are actually 2 equations at play which need to be solved.
1st being: ( r+s=2,000,000) also stated as (r= 2,000,000-s)
2nd being: 6r + 15s = 15,000,000
That said, we can now combine these 2 equations as one to get the solution. Since we know what r is in terms of s the final equation should now be:
6(2,000,000-s) +15s = 15,000,000 or simply s=333,333.33333...
once we know s we just plug back in to 1st equation.
r=2,000,000-333,333.3333...
r=1,666,666.6666...
In short, Andrew is correct. The world clearly needs algebra and math in general...
Alan: You're missing that there were 2 million transactions overall. Your answer has 2.5 million.
Sorry, I meant to say that Joey is right.
There is enough info to solve this problem.
It seems the real problem is that our society lacks the critical thinking skills to contextualize information and make educated inferences.
-Adam
Let the algebra lessons begin!