Thread: Mathematics and Woodies: Does it matter?

Maths is good and handy to know

Dave TTC
Turning Wood Into Art

Settle down and plan a story pole in western red cedar. The life story of a butterfly, beginning with the egg.
Plan this for 60 eggs and 60 caterpillars in 5 instar sizes then the cocoon and finally the adult butterfly.
Begin with a split 5" x 5" x 64" WRC pole. Round that off to a cylinder by hand and do all of the needed designs.

Better yet, do two of those poles at a time.
Took me 2 months of maths and planning. Both worked OK. Nothing left to do but 3-5 months carving.
Maths matters.

I'm one of those rare people who enjoy maths. When I was at school, we had two maths teachers who had been bomber navigators during WW II. It was not smart to suggest to them that maths was useless.

When I did my series of platonic solid boxes, it would have been quite easy to look up all the angles on the interweb (but I wouldn't have known they existed except for high school maths). It was much more fun to go back to the spherical trig that I hadn't used for over 30 years to calculate them.

I'm sure there are a lot of people who can just walk into the shed and bang out whatever projects they wish with no mathematical application whatsoever.
My grandfather could even build a house that way... back in the day when houses were simply "built to last a lifetime" not "engineered to a design service life" that's how a lot of houses were built.

Go lay down a hull from scratch though... Not some hard chined backyard build either. Steam bend your frames, and make her fair and sleek with sexy deep s curves so that she flows from stem to stern. Have her float, and take her to sea, and have her carry you as far as it's possible to go....
wooden ships are perhaps the pinnacle of the art of woodworking, and if you can't radius a curve you don't get past the lofting room floor.

Originally Posted by AlexS

I'm one of those rare people who enjoy maths. When I was at school, we had two maths teachers who had been bomber navigators during WW II. It was not smart to suggest to them that maths was useless.

When I did my series of platonic solid boxes, it would have been quite easy to look up all the angles on the interweb (but I wouldn't have known they existed except for high school maths). It was much more fun to go back to the spherical trig that I hadn't used for over 30 years to calculate them.

I like maths too. I spent 30 years teaching it to people from primary school to university. But it was my observation that it liking not often shared. When I was a boy spent months working on a problem, which I later realised inventing vector algebra for myself. I was horrified to find that nobody else cared. At least with wood plenty of people are addicted.

I had mediocre maths teachers, none of whom inspired any passion for the subject. I just scraped by the subject in exams and somehow survived the maths content on my electronics courses.
Fortunately, Google takes care of all my calculations these days.

Maths is great. As I said (in what I think was the thread you referred to) even if you don't use it as such, it teaches you how to think logically about a myriad of things - like woodwork.

I was very fortunate to have the same (very good) teacher for six years of High School Maths.

Yeah, but apart from computers, the internet, Google searches, woodworking machinery, tools and the GPS what has mathermatics ever done for us? NOTHING!

Actually I have used algebra a lot since leaving school, especially when I started using spreadsheet programs. Also use trig frequently in my job and all kinds of calculations in woodworking. Can't recall using calculus though.

Good thread, well done for posting Chook.

I'm astounded by the number of people who don't even know what Maths as a subject really is. What IS taught in schools? I constantly see people who can't add up blame their inability to perform a life skill on poor maths, be it from poor teaching or poor attitude/aptitude. Let's get it straight that addition and subtraction alone is not maths. As FenceFurniture says Maths teaches you more about logic than just about any other disciple. Also one can be a brilliant mathematician and still struggle with arithmetic sometimes. (Measure twice, cut once)

I often use cos sin & tan when working roof angels etc. In lack of a scientific calculator will use Pythagoras

Dave TTC
Turning Wood Into Art

I recently started on a pair of saw horses with splayed and angled legs with a I beam style top. it took me an embarrassingly long time to work out the geometry for the cuts.
On the plus side, there's little chance of me be able to cut accurately to the calculated lines so I can blame errors my woodworking incompetence rather than my mathematical ineptitude.

When I was a TAFE teacher,one of the things I did was take the calculators off the trainees, remove the batteries and give them back the calculator after smoko. That certainly got their attention, they soon realised the benefit of being able to work it out by themselves.

For some years, we had students doing population data analysis in Biology lab periods. Pool the individual data and work with data sets with thousands of entries. MS Excel was adequate.
What we observed was that the students cannot mentally estimate an answer. Because the calculator says so, because the maths app says so, they can't comprehend a gross error when they make one.
Excel had an advantage there. My problem is that I was taught all sorts of useful geometries but long before I had any use for it. I resent that but re-learning what I need has been a useful exploration.

When my three were growing up and asking for calculators, I was unpopular as I refused them until they showed me that they knew what they were doing method wise.
I was fortunate that I had good teachers right through High School until Matric (now showing my age) but still passed well then. We had to learn all the tables up to 20 times and in second form had a session of mental arithmetic at least once a week. It is surprising, or perhaps not, how many people cannot work out 10% discount without resorting to a calculator.