Careers in the Social Sciences
Do you need higher than a 4th grade math education in your job?
Hi Brad-- Your question, even though it is only one sentence long, is a very good one. It is one that I often asked during my years in school, and I probably started asking it when I was in fourth grade. And I kept asking it until I graduated from college. The answers came soon after I graduated from college with my degree in broadcasting. I am not a scientist although I am extremely interested in science. My career has been in journalism, both radio and TV news. And now I am a public information officer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, near San Francisco. You might think that in radio and television, the primary skill I needed, was knowing how to read, write well, and spell correctly. But there turned out to be a lot of technical things I needed to do. For example, one crucial thing in broadcasting is timing. A newscast must start at a specific time, and it needs to end on time so the next program can start. That means reporters and producers must learn to time their stories to the exact second. And that means being able to add and subtract quickly and accurately. But remember, we're dealing with time, and that means more than just 2+2=4. There is a lot of converting minutes to seconds and back again. So one minute and 28 seconds is actually 88 seconds. Try to quickly figure out when the newscaster needs to start reading a story that's two minutes and 43 seconds long, in order for it to end at the precise end of the newscast, which must be off the air at exactly 10:58:38 p.m. (That was the actual off-time when I worked at KTVU in San Francisco. We needed to have 22-seconds of commercials and promotional material before the next show started at 11 p.m.) Can you do that with your 4th grade math education? Okay, maybe you can. So let me move forward to my current job at the Lab. We have physicists, chemists, biologists, engineers, computer scientists, and just about every other kind of scientist at work here. And it amazes me to see how much of what they do involves math. One of the projects to which I am assigned, is the National Ignition Facility. It's a big 10-story building, longer than a football field. Inside, you'll find 192 laser beams, all pointed into a big round target chamber, aimed at a tiny container about the size of a Tylenol capsule. The light from all 192 beams must arrive at the capsule at precisely the same moment. And the light is extremely quick... it turns on and off faster than you can blink your eye. We're talking nanoseconds, between about 3 and 20 nanoseconds, depending on the experiment that is being done. Not only do the beams all need to arrive at the same moment, they must all arrive at exactly the same spot on the target. Otherwise the intensity is not high enough. So we're dealing not with inches, or millimeters. We're talking nanometers or microns. One of the scientists compares the difficulty of getting the beams to the target at the right intensity, time and position, to a baseball player throwing a ball from the mound at PacBell stadium in San Francisco, and having it called a strike at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, almost 500 miles away. The building is filled with special lenses to focus the laser beams, crystals to change the color of the laser light, and mirrors to turn the beams to a different direction. When the laser beam starts out, it is weaker than the kind of laser pointer you can buy at any store. But when all the beams arrive in the target chamber, they create temperatures of 100-million degrees, as hot as the inside of the sun. So how do the scientists figure out where to put all those lenses, crystals, and mirrors? They use math. They have studied the properties of light, how it interacts with various materials (such as glass, crystals and mirrors, as well as the tiny particles in the air through which the light must pass) and they calculate exactly how to position the laser beams and how to make everything work exactly right. And just to show how important it is that the math calculations are right: The National Ignition Facility costs almost three-and-a-half billion dollars. That's a lot of money. If it doesn't work, lots of people would get into a lot of trouble, and most of them would end up being fired. That's just one example from our Lab about the importance of math. But you know Brad, I'm no math genius. It was one of my worst subjects in school. And even though I myself am not involved with building a huge laser project, I'm always amazed how often I need to add up a series of numbers these days, whether I'm doing my taxes, dealing with my checkbook, trying to determine how much of a tip to leave for the waitress (try figuring out 17-percent of the total bill minus the sales tax in your head after a big meal) and even adding up the ingredients in a recipe that is printed for four people, but you are making it for seven people. So don't give up on math just yet. You may never need calculus (I haven't, and I'm 56 years old) but you will need to be able to quickly add, subtract, divide and multiply without a calculator. You'll need to know basic algebra and if you do any repairs on your house later in life, chances are you'll probably run into situations involving angles; in other words, geometry. Sorry Brad, but there's just no getting away from math. So hang in there. It's difficult and never gets a lot easier for some people (like me.) But rest assured, there will come a day when you least expect it later in your life (undoubtedly lots of times) when you'll be glad you know your multiplication tables. And all that that other stuff. Your Friend, Bob Hirschfeld