Understanding...Maths

What is this about?
One of my friends has made the point to me that some aspects of maths has no application to our daily lives. I agreed with him to a point until he brought in different ideas about the "why" aspect. So, just like I tried expressing that English is about developing expression and understanding, what is Maths about?

Overview
Maths is a Science as Science can be defined as understanding. Wait! Understanding again? Well I believe that Maths has three important parts about it: understanding, appreciation and problem solving.

Understanding and Value
It is human nature to understand and develop knowledge in how the world works. From birth, we do plenty of attempts at understanding the world we were born in to. The classic "touching the hot iron" or "eating to live" are all parts of our lives developed from something that made a light bulb click in our heads. It is important to recognise, that Maths is exactly that. The ability to value the why of concepts. The ability to be able to explain why the quantities are used the way they are to be more precise.

By studying Maths or rather, by being subjected to Maths, we are able to explain and place a value on a concept given. The number Zero, for example, is a value placed for things that have a value of nothing. We place Zero on a lot of things when we recognise they have no value. A lot of Maths is value, but we only value when we understand. Two apples, in another example, is a value we place on one apple and another apple - we use "two" because we understand that "two" represents "two". Maths is about value and understanding expression of different areas.

Appreciation
Some of the concepts were founded perhaps by chance, and others by their devoted studies. What we get out of this when we use their methods in Maths is that we appreciate their human ingenuity they've put into doing their work. We also use methods that have their alleged founder's name like Pythagoras' Theorem, Cartesian Planes or Euler's formula. If we don't already recognise and appreciate the work people put into these things, we must try to do so. These are examples of great human ingenuity - examples of human work when used for the better. We must further encourage and savour moments like these where human's work are used in the working life of some.

Problem Solving
Although Maths is about solving problems caused, this is about a context in our lives. Maths is about solving problems. 9+3 =? Being able to draw our understanding of values and using our skills as humans to solve it.

Summation
If you've been bored. Don't worry, I've been bored a bit about writing this one. Don't worry, the next blog topic will be about something more controversial - something that we may not understand but we like to think we do (yes, I think as well). Anyway, until then,
This is just A Small Point of View.

: )