Maths in the Real World – A Data Science Perspective

We often tell our students that we will use maths in the real world.

But then, quietly while we lie awake at night thinking about our day, planning for tomorrow and worrying about our kids (aka students) we wonder where on earth they will actually use the skills we have been trying to teach them.

Today, I got my results from the University of Witwatersrand. I went back to Univeristy at the age of 37 after spending 12 years with Sharp. If you’ve met me, you know that I have a passion for mathematics and for sharing this with everyone I meet. I believe that improving maths results in South Africa is going to be one of the key factors in improving our economy.

I have worked with schools, with learners of all ages, with new teachers, and wise teachers, with maths facilitators across the country, with NGO’s and businesses to try and make an impact in our maths community.

I believe that this website does have a major impact in maths classrooms across the country. I met a younger teacher the other day who shared that these worksheets really helped her with her students.

But, if we fail to motivate our learners, if we fail to help them understand that maths has far reaching and incredible consequences, then any effort being poured in is going to have half the impact.

But, I digress.

I now have a postgraduate diploma in Data Science. And I’m sure you have heard this buzz word lately. But what is it, and does it use maths?

The answer is a resounding yes!

Data Science uses maths, statistics and various programming lanaguages and packages to analyse big data. By big data we mean data sets with hundreds, thousands or even millions of rows (last night I worked on a dataset with 1.75 million rows of data).

As a data scientist you analyse big data. And you use this data to try and make predictions about future data. Data science has many applications. From using images from scans and MRI’s to identify what an issue is through machine learning, to predicting fraud through classification networks.

But the two things that underlie the huge strides data science is making, is maths and coding. And coding is essentially the word version of maths. Its using rules to manipulate an object to give you a specific answer. Just like we do in maths!

So, encourage your learners (whether they think they are maths people or not – they are) to enjoy maths, to pursue maths outside of the classroom, to enter the olympiads, and to make discoveries. You never know, you might be the one to discover the next maths stars who figure out new impossible-before-today proofs.

Maths at Sharp will continue to be here to support you through you and your learners maths journeys, and we count that as privelege.

Forever a maths nerd,

Tal