Help with Research Paper

[DWayne27]

I know this is completely unrelated to anything outdoorsy, or fun for that matter, but I also know there are alot of smart folks hanging around here, so I thought I would ask for some help.

I am doing a research paper for a math class, and collecting information about how math is used in the 'real world'. If you use math in anyway in your job, please respond, and let me know how you use math, what it is you do, and if you like - what position you hold with what company (or what kind of company if you dont want to give too personal of information out).

Any responses will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[REDFOX]

I am a commercial plumber. We use math all day long. Something simple such as installing pipe hanger supports from the trusses requires us to measure from the ceiling to the bottom of the pipe and then subtract the clevis hanger allowance in order to cut the all thread rod at the proper length. When doing a rolling offset to connect two pipes this formula is used. Rise squared multiplied by the offset squared equals the sum which you then take the square root of that number multiplied by 1.414. That number is the length of pipe required. Sometimes we use volume formulas to calculate the weight of water inside of a pipe while it is under test.

[ststephen]

I'm in software engineering. There is math in few places but maybe less than one might think for an engineering discipline.

Statistics are important for all sorts of analysis of performance: UI response, memory use, bug find/fix rates, etc.

Cryptography uses tons of math like prime factorization using very large prime numbers. But for most of the people coding or using these algorithms they don't have to really know the math theory behind it.

Error detection and correction algorithms use various types of polynomial math algorithms, but again usually there's a simple library you can link with instead of writing it yourself.

Then all the image and video compression techniques have fascinating uses of math. MPEG has all of this discreet cosine transformation stuff that is the basis of all the digital TV you watch day-in day-out. But again, almost no one really deals with it except if you are writing firmware or chips to do the actual compression/decompression.

PM me if you want to go deep on any of this. I was a math/physics major and basically never get to *really* use what I studied so hard on!

[DOSS]

Call center management.. my old profession :) - math is used daily.. from using erlang c (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_%28unit%29) calculations to determine staffing, some simple weighted averages to figure out individual performance as well as group performance (and I swear half the world can't seem to get how to do a weighted average or why it is important. errg).. those are the most common items used all the time in call center management.. also a lot of conversions from different ways of handling numbers (hh:mm:ss to decimal and then back etc)

[Sombeech]

I was an Inventory Manager for @ 7 years, constantly measuring the stock on hand vs the demand, inventory turns per year, surplus, dead stock...

We would try to be at 5 turns (selling through a certain inventory category 5 times per year, weighting the stock $$ amount vs the category sales). Also figuring the amount of dead stock or surplus vs total inventory $$ on hand, stuff like that. Figuring the amount of the restock fee to return the dead stock to our vendors vs the ROI for our "A & B" items.

[Salmoholic]

I'm a machinist lots of trig to locate points off blueprints, drill depths relative to point for good thread engagement, algebra for cutting speeds and feeds of tools and materials. All machine tools use the cartesian coordinate system to describe motion i.e. x,y,z.

[Scott Card]

Lawyer. I use math to calculate damages in personal injury cases, bring future earnings to present value, life expectancy tables, travel speed based on skid marks, etc. In divorce law I calculate child support, alimony, debt distribution, value assets (property, stocks, retirements...etc.). In criminal law I use math to calculate distance for drug free zones, blood alcohol content, small numbers to calculate some client's I.Q. (just kidding).

I use math to do basic accounting, billing time vs. hourly rates, flat fees plus costs, contingency fees following settlements. Jeez, I never really thought about that question of yours. Scary how much I use mostly simple math....

[Cirrus2000]

Air traffic control: If an aircraft is doing 140 knots, and is 5 miles from touchdown, do I have time to depart a British Airways 747? (Answer: maybe - those guys can be pretty darn slow around the corner.) Or, if a Dash 8 is doing 210, and is 12 miles out, it's 13:54, and United has a 13:58 valid time to depart for San Francisco, should I put United out on the runway? (Answer: yes). Boeing 737 is rolling, a Beech King Air 350 who will turn away from the flight path of the 737, but is IFR, is waiting to go. Traffic is just inside 4 miles, doing 170. Can I launch the King Air before the lander is down? (Answer: yes, if the Beech will waive the required 4 miles wake turbulence separation, but no if they won't.)

All extremely simple rate distance time stuff. But that's perfect, because I'm extremely simple!

[Ih8grvty]

My wife is an accountant, does all the CABs billing for a telephone company, her entire job is math. CABs is far to hard to explain though, trust me she tried.

[Deathcricket]

Sure. I'm working on troubleshooting some formulas to calculate agent stats from an integrated DB. There is loads and loads of math involved. I'm pretty sure our (Oracle) reports are available to the general public without charge. I'll post one below. They include the formulas we actually use to get the results our customers need to increase their productivity and manage thousands of users simultaneously. So if you want to browse the document I'm sure no one would care. It might be interesting to know that to hire an Oracle tech to create a custom report NOT included in the free ones we provide runs $390-$550 an hour, depending on the amount of components needed. And we are so busy there is a 4-6 month wait until someone is available. So it's quite lucrative and techs are very high in demand right now.

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E15278_01/books/CCA_Reports_811.pdf

Here is the specific one I suspect has an error in it. Page 146 of the document.

Average
Interaction
Duration
The average time of the
interaction. =

[Sum(TimeABUACDCalls) +
Sum(TimeTalkACDCalls) +
Sum(TimeWrapACDCalls)]
/ TotABUACD Calls

[DOSS]

ahh call center math.. it sure is fun.. we used to do this all manually (well sorta) pulling from DB's and doing the math in Excel ohh the fun when none of the DB's used the same formats..

[Iceaxe]

Hahaha.... I'm a Structural Engineer, math is my game...

I'm president of the company, so now I spend about half my day doing engineering and about half my day doing management type stuff... But back when I was just an engineer I spent all day every day doing nothing but math. Tons of trig... I can do trig while standing on my head, juggling and eating green eggs and ham....

Computers do a lot of the math for us now. Just pore the information in and the computer will do the calculations, but I come form back in the day when everything was old school... We worked on "the board" and used a "Smoley's"....

[Felicia]

I use math to calculate jail credits, penalties and fines, and convert monies to community service.

[Deathcricket]

ahh call center math.. it sure is fun.. we used to do this all manually (well sorta) pulling from DB's and doing the math in Excel ohh the fun when none of the DB's used the same formats..

Hehe must be "one you guys" that I'm working with. He did a query manually to the DB, inputed the numbers to an excel sheet (through csv data), and got a different result than our system did. Then reported the error. Turns out our reports were miscalculating the formula and have been doing so since 2007ish. Thousands upon thousands of people using this and he is the first person to find it. I was pretty impressed!

[brookiekiller]

Payroll Processor - use it all the time.

[Don]

The average Monday meeting for the bosses is about 35 minutes. Got to wait 5 minutes for the meeting to really get started or someone is likely to pop out for some forgotten notes. Got to leave time at the end in case the meeting runs short. That gives me about 20 minutes to get to the coffee shop, order, consume and return.

[ddavis]

I use math in my job quite a bit - rocket motor aging. I design studies to measure properties of different parts of a solid rocket motor (my focus is usually on the propellant) under different environmental conditions, and then I use the measured data to try and predict what those properties will be at some point in the future. I have to figure out appropriate fit equations for the data, calculate rate constants, and do Arhenius analyses (the method is actually chemistry, but how it's done is math). It involves mainly algebra, although there is some calculus involved sometimes. I also use a fair amount of statistics (more than I like - I hate statistics) to determine goodness of fits, confidence and significance, stuff like that.

[Scott Card]

Amazingly, I have found this thread quite interesting.:2thumbs:

[Jaxx]

Insurance agent. I use basic math everyday. Usually to help people figure out how much a new car will be or add up how much they owe.

[DWayne27]

Wow - thanks guys! I didnt get much response at first, so I kinda forgot about it. Gotta have a draft of the paper turned in tomorrow so I thought I'd see if I got any results. This is awesome.

Thanks again!

[Sombeech]

I'm pretty good at math, and I've found that being a musician helps with that. Not sure why, maybe it's the memorization, rhythm, and scales, but I've heard this to be true with a lot of people, that the two reinforce each other.