Just like there are cat people and dog people, so there are math people and... all the rest of the population.
You see, while we, the mortal ones, still dread the memory of a cursed math exam which ruined our final semester back in high school and shattered our dreams, self-esteem, and carefree summer vacation ahead, some find great comfort in numbers.
If you’re one of them, looking for a space to flex your math muscle, you came to the right place. Welcome to the They Did The Math subreddit where 944k took ‘do the math’ literally and came up with very interesting results. “Useless yet interesting calculations,” states the community’s description and who doesn’t like arguments proven by the power of determination and careful mathematical calculation?
Scroll down, upvote your favorite posts, and be sure to check out our previous post with more examples of people and numbers being best friends.
#2 Can Someone Confirm Its True?
"Oxfam international said that... I don't know the exact figures but simple logic dictates that it certainly can easily be true. Think about it, most people in the world are poor, which means they have little to no net worth.
If Bezos has a net worth of 200 billion and each of these 4 billion people have 50 dollars in net worth, then you're already there. 50 dollars in net worth is not an outrageous number given that many Americans have negative net worth and little to no savings to speak of.
I don't know how much the top 8 are worth, but let's say it's 1 trillion. That means that the 4 billion are worth 250 dollars. Yeah that's plausible.
By the way even if you make 100,000 a year in the US you can have a net worth of 0 or negative net worth depending on what your savings/investments and liabilities are, which is often the case."
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189points
While a small fraction of society enjoys numbers just as much if not more than writers love books, most of us, some secretly, some not, are somewhat scared of this discipline. In fact, there’s even a whole term for it named ‘math anxiety’ and it describes people who experience feelings of stress when faced with math-related situations.
Moreover, it has some real-life consequences. Math anxiety (MA) has been suggested to decrease the math performance of students. The research has found that MA has a direct, negative influence on students' performance and that this negative link between the two was strongest among senior high school students. It was particularly strong among studies using custom tests and studies that assessed problem-solving skills.
#4 I Stumbled On This Post And I’m Wondering If This Is True! Any Ideas ?
"According to the source it says it would take $20B to eliminate homelessness
The most expensive US aircraft carrier is $12.8B. So it's about 7.2B short. However, this is only the cost to build it, and excluded operational costs."
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153points
#5 Math Lead Them To This Conclusion
"Lead can also be created directly in supernova explosions. It doesn't have to originate from nuclear decay."
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138points
#6 How Much Memory Could Be Stored Today In The Same Volume As The Image On The Left?
"A micro SD card has a volume of 165 mm3. I estimate that box to be 8'x3'x20'.. This comes out to around 82 million SD cards, assuming a 100% packing efficiency. At 1TB per card that would come out to 82 Exobytes. .
It's hard to find a reliable estimate of the total data on the internet, but this website says 44 zettabytes, which means our box contains about 0.2% of the internet. Storing the whole internet on 1TB SD cards would take around 7300 m3, equivalent to a cube about 20m per side or 3 Olympic swimming pools"
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121points
So in order to find out where this belief that math is the most difficult science nut to crack out there comes from, we spoke with Dan Meyer, the Chief Academic Officer at Desmos, exploring the future of math, technology, and learning. Dan has been advocating for better math instruction here and on CNN, Good Morning America, etc. and he was named one of Tech & Learning’s 30 Leaders of the Future.
“Students often come to believe that math is strictly about getting right and wrong answers to problems about calculations, that there are many ways to be wrong and only one way to be right,” he said. However, “math, as it's practiced by mathematicians, by professionals, and by people across cultures, often emphasizes experimentation, play, coming up with an idea, testing it out, and improving it,” Dan explained.
#7 What Would The Price Difference Equate To? How Would Preparation Time And Labor Influence The Cost?
"I think we have to work this out at UK prices, because, as people have pointed out, that's a £3 tesco meal deal on the left, with a starbucks drink and a pastry. Also, we need to compare like with like, and US and UK food prices are vastly different.
As the meal deal items are from tesco, we can get the nutritional info from the website, which is important for working out the price.
The Salt and Vinegar McCoys are 251KCal, coke is 210KCal, and the sandwich looks closest to their chicken bacon and stuffing sandwiches, which is 483KCal. That's 944 KCal, so the other two items should add up to around 656KCal.
As three items are from tesco, I'm going to guess the other two are from the same store and that's a butter croissant from starbucks, at 259KCal costing £1.19 if you eat out, which I'm guessing is the situation as they've been taken away for this photo.
That means the drink is something from starbucks with 397KCal. A 500ml coke bottle is 23.5cm high, so that looks like a 18cm tall starbucks cup, maybe 16cm without the lid. A venti cup is a little over 15cm tall, which means that's a venti.
There actually is a venti drink from Starbucks with a calorie count of 397, which is a hot chocolate with whole milk, and as that's £2.65 to go, that brings the left hand total to £6.84.
That's the easy part.
Now the right hand side. Reverse image search on the cropped right hand side didn't show anything up, so doing it the hard way, we have avocado on ryvita, mixed berries, yoghurt with mixed berries, Looks like spinach on two of the plates, kale on two, yoghurt, broccoli, cauliflower, tomato, and then it is a bit more guess-y. Top right plate has some sort of grain, maybe rice, maybe bulgar wheat or somthing. There's also something spreadable, I'm guessing houmous. I'd guess that's bulgar wheat with bell peppers, houmous with a little paprika on top, and kale.
The plate of mixed berries in the middle towards the top just looks like strawberries and blueberries.
Left hand side middle looks like yoghurt with chia seeds sprinkled on, wilted spinach, and something red which looks tomato based, so maybe a salsa? I could be way off and it could be a mashed root veg like carrot or sweet potato also, but I think I see a little liquid from it at the lower end where it meets the spinach, so I'm going with a mild salsa.
On the middle right, there's broccoli and cauliflower, kale and something red, which I think is tomato, but may possibly be bell pepper? The other item is a little harder, but I think that's a baked potato with tuna filling.
Bottom left plate is wilted spinach again, tomato, and some sort of mushroom dish. Looks like there's kale, tomato, and something else in there. Maybe cauliflower, but very possibly a bunch of ingredients you can't tell at that resolution and just from a picture.
Bottom right is just yoghurt with more strawberries and blueberries.
Now for pricing. I'll get the prices off tesco, but lots of this stuff is seasonal, so it'll vary through the year. Note that UK food prices are lower, 'cause last time I did this, no-one believed we pay so little for food. You can check the prices at tesco.com if you use a vpn or something to pretend you're in the UK.
Ryvita - get the off brand ones for 69p. About 28 per pack, so 5p for the ones shown. I'll do all the pricing like that as you could divide the food amongst multiple meals or multiple people.
Avocado, 75p. I'm going to say that's a whole avocado in the image.
Bulgar wheat, 500g for £1.15, so let's say 75g, costing about 17p.
Bell pepper, 86p for 3, so probably 28p for one will get you enough bell pepper for all the stuff in the picture.
Houmous, £1.10. You can make it yourself for less, but that's a bit OTT for this calculation.
Regular kale is out of stock when I searched, which is fine, as whenever you do this you'll find some stuff is more expensive, so it'll even out. That means buying the expensive kale, at 1.5 for 200g, which will do all the kale in the picture.
Let's make sure to include the paprika, which is 90p for 52g which can mostly sit in your cupboard, so let's add 2p in paprika.
Strawberries - £1.39 for 227g, enough for the whole image.
Blueberries - 89p for 125g, again enough for every dish.
Mild salsa - 80p
spinach - 900g for £1.50. Given how much this stuff shrinks as you cook it, even if you could split it over more than one day, I'll play it safe and just say that's for this set of meals.
Chia seeds are £1 for 150g, so that's maybe a 5p sprinkle at most.
Yoghurt - 75p for 500g, which also means we now have everything for the bottom right dish.
One big spud - 25p
tuna - £1.20 frozen bag of cauliflower and broccoli mix is 89p for 900g, so that's 25p in broccoli/cauliflower at most.
We already have the kale and pepper
One tomato - 15p
two mushrooms - 12p
We probably already have the other ingredients, but let's add in a little more in case there's something significant missed for that recipe. Based on the existing prices, I'll add in another 10p for a possible mystery ingredient.
That gives us a total of £11.32 for the stuff on the right, vs £6.84 for the stuff on the left.
Labour time will influence the cost, but all the actual meals on the right are super quick to prepare. The worst might be the potato, but even then it's about a minute to prepare it, then you just leave it in the oven and come back. All the meals have suprisingly low prep time."
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113points
#8 Is This True?
"The video I just saw showed that they spent about 5 minutes naming the victims of 9/11, of which there were 2997 victims. Johns Hopkins has the USA at 463,437. All you need to do is set up a ratio.
5 minutes / 2997 deaths = x minutes / 463437 deaths
463437 * 5 / 2997 = x
x = 773.1681681681681681681681681681...
Which works out to 12 hours 53 minutes 10.09 seconds"
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113points
#9 Why Can’t People Do Math Properly? Recalculate!
"The only error here is the rounding in 4 weeks per month. There's actually around 365.24 / 12 / 7 =~ 4.348 weeks in a month.
So you'd make $5,000 * 4.348 = $21,740 per month and $21,740 * 12 = $260,880 per year.
That means it'd take you $1,000,000,000 / $260,880 =~ 3,833 years to get to a billion dollars.
Yeah, it's a bit off from what they got but it illustrates the point just as well.
All the other maths is correct."
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102points
He also noted that it's the math students need right now. When asked how you teach children to be interested in mathematics so they don't dread it as they turn into adults, Dan had a couple of suggestions. “Ask questions that offer students opportunities to draw on their senses and their intuition, questions that have lots of possible answers, where even the wrong answers are interesting.”
He continued: “For example, show students a pattern of shapes that's growing predictably. Ask them what they notice about the pattern? What do they wonder? How long they think it'll take the pattern to reach a certain size? And only then help them with their calculations.”
#10 In Soviet Russia, Coffee Is Served At A Ridiculous Pace
"For anyone wanting context, Stakhanov was a common caricature for a while in soviet culture (based on a real person), about people who go way above and beyond in their job. Like a chuck norris, but for manual labor.
It started out serious (the real person apparently hauled 100 tons of coal in 6 hours), and he was promoted as a person to be emulated. But the tales got more and more outlandish as time went on, as people got disillusioned with the whole idea"
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83points
#11 Does Zuckerberg Hold 2% Of All Millennial Wealth?
"Millenials own 5000B wealth, per this:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charting-the-growing-generational-wealth-gap/
Zuckerberg owns 111B of it, per this:
https://www.forbes.com/profile/mark-zuckerberg/?sh=33dcc42b3e06"
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81points
#12 How True Is This???
"Jeff Bezos net worth: $181,200,000,000
Baltimore average net worth: $555,423
Baltimore median net worth: $255,000
Baltimore population: 593,490
Total net worth (without Bezos): $329,637,996,270
Total net worth (with Bezos): $510,837,996,270
Average net worth, with Jeff Bezos: $860,735.
(I assume the median would remain at $255,000)"
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78points
#14 In 100 M Of Space, How Many More Bricks Would A Regular Straight Fence Have?
"As you can see in the picture it's a very thin wall, looks to be 1 brick thick. A straight wall only has support on one axis and would need to be at least a few bricks thick to stay standing. The curved wall allows more support in multiple axis allowing the use of less bricks."
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75points
#15 If You Blended All 7.88 Billion People On Earth Into A Fine Goo (Density Of A Human = 985 Kg/M3, Average Human Body Mass = 62 Kg), You Would End Up With A Sphere Of Human Goo Just Under 1 Km Wide. I Made A Visualization Of How That Would Look Like In The Middle Of Central Park In NYC
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72points
#16 How Much Money Would It Be If The U.s Government Did This?
"First source I found shows FY2020 military budget is $714B, so cutting 25% would be $178.5B. I think that's a conservative number, considering that they may have gone over budget and it'll likely increase going forward.
A very simple look at wealth tax would be looking at total net worth of millionaires or billionaires in the US. Not able to find a distinct number for millionaires, but I see that the 660 billionaires in the US have a total wealth of $4.1T. 1% of that is $41B."
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70points
#17 Is This Really The Price Difference In Wood Between January 2020 And June 2021?
"For what it's worth, I live in the pacific northwest - timber country - and the price of wood has gone up over 100%. Elsewhere I know it's more. I have been harvesting fallen trees in the woods for projects lately. The complication with this question is that the prices have inflated different amounts in different places . So this could be correct where the photo was taken."
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61points
#18 How Many Bees ?
"Some additional math:
- 10k bees weigh about 3 pounds, so 6.3M bees is about 1900 lbs. No problem for the car.
- 1/2 cup of bees (0.00418 cu ft) = 300 bees. Using that with a 141.3 cu ft interior results in 10.1 million bees.
- 30k-60k bees need 2 deep boxes for a hive (3.33 cu/ft). So if you wanted the bees to build a hive in the Lexus, there would only be room for 1.2-2.4 million bees.
Any way you do the math, it's the same order of magnitude."
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59points
#20 Big Ooof If True. I Checked The Link And The Numbers Did Make Sense. Can Someone Double Check With Me?
"So the US spent $718.69 billion on military stuff last year. So 3% of that is $21.560 Billion. Using the stats from this website:
https://www.globalgiving.org/learn/how-much-would-it-cost-to-end-world-hunger/
You’d have to be able to feed each of the ~820 million critically hungry people on $26.29 each- for a whole year. maybe feasible in some countries, since the US dollar can be pretty strong, but definitely not in most.
Granted, the sign could be suggesting an investment in infrastructure to make food cheaper for everyone. But on the face of things, you could probably end world hunger for maybe six meals"
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49points