#246 How Many?

I was a mathematics major in college. All my life I've referred to my chosen area of study as math. But when I was a young adult I encountered other English-speakers (people from places like England and Australia and New Zealand) who called this academic field maths. At first I simply thought this was strange. Certainly maths is a reasonable abbreviation of mathematics, even if it doesn't seem quite as natural to me as math. But thinking as a mathematics major, I don't really like "maths" as a term. I took a whole lot of mathematical courses in college—calculus, real analysis, geometry, algebra (both linear and abstract), probability and statistics—but one of the main things I learned is that these weren't different subject matters. Mathematics is one thing. Think of a tree: the branches may go in very different directions, but they all grow out of one trunk. That's the way mathematics works. There aren't many maths; there's a singular math. I think calling mathematics "maths" can be misleading. "Branches" such as algebra and geometry aren't truly separate, even if we tend to look at them one at a time. The branches connect and overlap in all sorts of surprising and beautiful ways. All the math we know is just part of a greater whole.

Grace and peace,

BMH