Finding Mathematics in the Greater World

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Outside our doors the numbers keep corning. Many years ago at a school where the authors taught, there was a special survival skills project for a group of refugees from Cambodia called the "boat people." Instead of corning from cities and towns, these boat people had lived on farms and in rural areas. They could not read or write. They did not know our system of numbers. Therefore, when their teacher gave them an assignment to go to Second Street, take the number 10 bus at 10:15 A.M., pay 75 cents bus fare, and travel across town to 116 Louisiana, they got lost. They did not understand our way of numbering streets or houses. The bus schedule made no sense, and our money system of cents and dollars confused them.

We actually live in a world made orderly and workable by numbers and mathematics. Today, those of us who grew up in this society have little trouble finding street addresses; if we don't know where something is immediately, we can use street maps laid out on a complex but (for us) perfectly understandable grid. Reading the grid is fairly simple. Developing it wasn't.

The surveyors and planners who layout land for development do so using complicated calculations that describe each plot precisely in terms of longitude and latitude and in relation to all the other surveyed land in the country.

Surveying land calls for observations and calculations involving the position of the sun as well as features of the land itself, such as location of trees and streams. And to make the calculations, the surveyor must have a good grasp of such mathematics as arithmetic, geometry, and trigonometry as well as the ability to integrate the historical data of early surveys with contemporary, upgraded maps.

In other words, our homes, businesses, and schools are sitting in the middle of a vast, interconnected mathematics problem. We can't see the lines of longitude and latitude that run north and south and east and west, but having them there as ideas affects us every time we buy a new house or find our way home to one of the carefully marked spots on the map.

Mathematical errors by surveyors have led to boundary disputes and even property feuds between landowners. A small mistake in a calculation or a land description could mean that your garage is in your neighbor's yard, or your neighbor's back fence is on someone else's land.

The ancient Greeks believed that numbers were so important that they were actually the atoms making up the world. We know now that atoms are made up of matter and energy instead of ideas. While numbers are not the building blocks of physical reality, we can call mathematics and numbers the underlying and organizing principles, rules, and laws, for many of our perceptions of the world as well as a way for ordering many of our relationships with other people.