Real Math Examples - DataBank

I’m an amateur long distance runner and I’ve always found it surprising just how long it takes me to catch the slowpokes!

Here is an example: If I run twice as quickly as someone else and I give them a five minute head start, in my mind I expect to catch them in a few minutes. I am running twice as quickly as they are, after all, like a rabbit versus a tortoise! In fact, I will only catch them after running full speed for an additional five minutes.

Here is a site with articles showcasing how real math is used in real companies:
www.teachingcollegemath.com/Real_math

There are some great articles linked from the site; check it out.

Here is the scenerio:

Next month we're planning a trip from Montreal to Niagra Falls. My husband is going to run the Niagra Falls marathon, so we're going for the weekend.

Our car uses about 1 gas tank (50L of gas) for approximately 600km. The distance from Montreal to Niagra falls is 667km (you could get the students to look this up as an extra challenge). Also I plan to drive around in Niagra falls a bit (at least 84km, as I have to drive my husband to the start of the Marathon, which is 42km long, and then come back to the finish line in Niagra Falls).

While visiting a farm, a bull had broken his penis. In order to help him with the healing process and any infections that would come from this terrible incident, the farm hand had to administer penicillin to him. On the bottle, there was a dosage of penicillin per 1kg. But she only knew the weight of the animal in pounds --> 900lbs. So she asks... how many kilograms in 900lbs?

Building a bunk bed requires a lot of calculations and manipulations of numbers. But it was mostly straight forward until I got to the ladder part. Then I had to take out my calculator and figure out the angles, what my piece of wood had to look like in order to make it square with the rest of the bunk bed. It was a great application of my sin, cos, and tan and pythagoras theorem from junior high school.

Part of my job is being a spreadsheet monkey that analyzes or creates mountains of data. One of the things I love to do is find quick or elegant ways of doing things in Excel. Very commonly, I have to do is to take a cash flow stream that totals one number and "scale" it so that it totals a different number, but keep the relative amounts the same. For example, suppose you are budgeting the sales trip expenses for your department for next year. Usually you would start from this year's expenses, say they were $30,000 .

As I was making braised beef short ribs for dinner the other night, I was faced with the question of which piece of cookware to use - the rectangular lasagna pan (in the shape of a rectangular cube) or the circular Dutch oven (in the shape of a cylinder)? Or did it even matter? I wanted to use the piece of cookware with the largest volume possible since I had a lot of short ribs and wanted to cover them completely with broth. Without using specific numbers, how would I go about finding out which piece of cookware has the largest volume?

When you own an outdoor swimming pool, in the spring you need to "shock" it, which means add a large amount of chlorine, in order to kill all the backteria and algea that accumulated over the fall/winter/spring. But chlorine is expensive, so you don't want to add too much (and waste it). In order to figure out how much to add, you need to figure out the volume of your pool, since the label on the chlorine tells you how much to add per litre of water.

You need to know how big to make the quilt. For example, a crib quilt might be in the neighborhood of 50 x 60 inches, whereas a queen size quilt would be more like 94 x 108 inches. You can figure this out by measuring the mattress and allowing for the length of overhang you want (on both sides, and the bottom, and enough to cover the pillows if desired on the top).  Or, you can find a chart that tells you standard quilt sizes.

This is a great list of all the different fields that require math:

http://www.ams.org/mathmoments