There are probably an infinite number of math problems. When you are studying mathematics in primary or secondary school, you have no idea of the huge world of mathematics that exists at the university and post-university level. Also, when you’re studying elementary-level math, it’s sometimes hard to make the connection between seemingly insignificant math problems and the sheer power of math to solve real-life problems.
Take medicine, for example. Students who started out just like you and me, learning about square roots and fractions in grade school and high school, ended up using math to solve major health problems like polio and tetanus. By turning health problems into math problems, collecting data, and turning it into numbers, public health workers and epidemiologists discovered what was causing these illnesses. Then they solved the math problems and figured out how to get rid of diseases.
Without the beginning elements of addition, subtraction, algebra, geometry, calculus, and statistics, this could not have happened. The mastery of finding solutions to mathematical problems allowed scientists to solve health problems and alleviate human suffering. By doing a statistical analysis of the numbers, they developed vaccines for these problems. All this would be impossible without mathematics.
At the college level, students often see seemingly meaningless math problems, like how much bread Joe can carry if his bike has a 1-foot-by-1-foot basket, turn into real-life problems. If you study social studies, you will investigate using mathematics. By the time they get to graduate school, the statistical part of math problems is often solved with SPSS. However, the student must understand what the data is telling them and know how to input it into the program for it to work.
Improving your home is also another area where you will find math problems. If you want to repaint one or several walls, you have to solve many problems. Although this may seem simple enough, you still need to know how to add, multiply, divide, subtract, and do basic algebra. It is for this reason that everyone in the United States must achieve at least basic proficiency in mathematics. People who study education are aware that all aspects of our daily lives involve mathematics in many ways.
For many people, the simple words “math problems” always go together and seem like a negative thing. We think of the word “problem” as something we want to get rid of. It would be better if we called them “math puzzles”. Isn’t that more tempting? Math puzzles would be something fun, playful, or exciting. And that’s what math is all about.
When we do math problems, we take various parts of the puzzle, various concepts, and put them together. That’s the mystery part and it provides the framework for the puzzle. In real life we always have some elements of the puzzle, like the speed of a vehicle and how far the vehicle is going to go. That is the information we have to put together with the concepts. We can put the concepts together with the information and thus we complete the puzzle. This is what math problems really are.