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This can be a mathematics discussion thread. I absolutely love mathematics.

How come barely anyone likes it? Numbers fascinate me.

It's just a shame pure math doesn't lead to any careers.

I've always just thought of math as tedious and uninteresting. I do like most math, but once you get into the more complicated parts, especially in Geometry, it becomes seriously annoying.

I love it.

I love how everything is interconnected and linked...humans have done so much amazing work in the field it's unreal.

They're all trying to come up with a way of predicting the distribution of the prime numbers, which interests me greatly...I've been learning about algorithms to find them in my studies.

Are you sure about that? Maybe they weren't speaking of pure math, but last time I checked the degree list that pretty much guaranteed a career, math was right up there.

Certainly a solid knowledge of math is required in many degrees...but if you become an expert in pure math only...you can only really become a teacher or a college professor.

Those certainly count as jobs. Surely there's research left in pure math? New models to make and such?

Yep, but that research is a job for academics/professors/phD students.

I doubt anyone gets paid just to sit around and try to prove unproven mathematical conjectures.

Although they are offering $1,000,000 to anyone who proves Riemann's hypothesis.

There's still a whole world to explore with prime numbers. Mathematicians don't really understand them very well. They haven't found a formula to calculate the n'th prime and they haven't found a pattern with them.

Once they learn more about prime numbers, they can greatly improve the functioning of computer systems. And primes are used in decoding messages (public cryptography).

Math is certainly interesting, but I was never good at it. My brother looooooooooves math and numbers! He is a genius and we call him the human calculator. We always joke, instead of getting a letterman's jacket in HS, he should have gotten a numberman's jacket =)

What about engineers?

just like biology

Oh man, I love biology. Especially in the nervous system. It's just the most amazing stuff I've ever come across.

Course, I also don't find math to be as annoying as most people do. It's not my passion, but I enjoy it. (Except statistics, mostly because it's tedious.) I'm just a big science geek.

Oh no, you brought up statistics. ::sigh:: I got into an argument once with a math teacher. I am not a fan of statistics of any nature. You see, I am a logical person, not a technical person. (if that makes sense) Anyway... she was trying to explain "What is the statistic that it will rain today?" And I said "50%. Everyday we have a chance of 50% rain" She said that was wrong and asked how I came up with my conclusion. I replied "Because logically, it either will rain or it won't rain. Two choices; 50/50." Not looking for anyone to crunch numbers or "prove me wrong" That's just how I think. She spent the rest of the class trying to show me how I was wrong. But I still believe my logic of thinking was right for me

Well... while it is true that there are only two options (it will rain or it won't) that doesn't necessarily make them equally likely, even from a logical standpoint.
For example, I live in Colorado, a semi-arid climate. It doesn't rain here nearly as much as in, say, Oregon.
Okay, so stay with me on this. If it rained approximately 182 days out of the year, the probability of rain would be 50/50, like a coin toss (which we would expect to come up heads approximately 182 times out of 364 flips) but in Colorado, it only tends to rain approximately 100 days out of the year, making it an inequal probability; only about 30% chance that it will rain in Colorado on any given day. In Oregon, it rains closer to 250 days out of the year, making it more probable that it will rain than that it won't.

I can even combine this with biology, just for extra zest. There are two types of blood antibodies that someone can be born with; A and B. There's also the option of having none (O type blood) or having both (AB blood). If you ask twelve randomly selected people off the street what their blood type is, however, you aren't going to get three A types, three B types, three O types, and three AB types, because certain blood types are more common than others; the probabilities are not equally likely. Out of twelve people, you might get one with AB blood, one or two with B blood, one or two with A blood, and the rest will be type O, because that is the most common type.

I'm a pretty logical person, too, so hopefully I explained that logically enough. Just don't ask me to explain the formula for standard deviation logically, because that one I can't do. Probability, though, is pretty logical, it's just not always in a nice, neat, even way.

I see what you're saying. But I still stand by my 50/50 logic. I live in Florida, you see... and it has snowed here before. Not a normal thing for Florida. We're The Sunshine State. I live closer to Tampa and it snowed there for one day just this past winter.

I wish I could be a brainy math fan, but it's all too much... the numbers!!!!

I love Florida!!! I'm going down there tomorrow actually, and will be there for the rest of the week!

When I took Geometry, we got brand new textbooks that had just been written and issued. The first chapter was basic stuff like lines, line segments and rays. There was a new figure they had added though. It was called an "opposite ray", and the definition was "a point with lines extending from it in opposite directions". Yeah, for real.

If you live in Florida, there's more like a 90% chance of rain. It isn't much of a sunshine state, considering that there's a pop-up storm almost every afternoon in some parts.