I once asked my primary-care physician, an internal medicine specialist,
how he used mathematics in his work.  (We should all do this.)

He said that mostly he used his understanding of statistics
when reading the medical literature -- so that he could appreciate
small-sample issues, know how various parameters were defined, etc.
That made sense to me.

But a few minutes later he was discussing my EKG.
I had told him that when in my youth I was an astronaut candidate
an Air Force doctor had explained to me that I didn't have
cardiac hypertrophy (as I had been told by a campus-clinic doctor),
but my heart sat at an unusual angle, which caused it
to appear outsized from the usual A-P direction.
My internist then showed me how this could be seen on my EKG,
and he used the language of dipoles -- showing that he was
comfortable with vectors in space, without being conscious of it.

You could argue that these examples are statistics and physics,
rather than mathematics, but that would be nit-picking;
I am saying that they use the type of thinking
that we try to inculcate in mathematics courses.

At 07:37 AM 5/21/2010, Charles Weaver wrote:
>I read the article last night and it seems to me that there are some things that are taught in some math courses that are definitely usefull in real life. These are things related to the interpretaion of data. For example, the problem about how likely you are to have breast cancer if you get a positive result on a mamogram, or being able to understand vstandard deviations and what it means about sample data that is reported, or how to draw addition conclusions about data is reported on how many people belong to various groups (buy a Ford, eat Wheaties for breakfast etc.) Another example is how loan payments are calculated.
> 
>Admittedly these are not from the main stream algebra calculus track but in fact the math needed to understand how these work does involve algebra and calculus. So maybe the examples used in these course are just the wrong ones.

Martin C. Tangora
University of Illinois at Chicago
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