(Disclaimer: I have ADHD and am completely useless when it comes to math. So please forgive me for being super-stupid on the subject.)
To my understanding, Mathematics are seen as completely logical. Which I don’t have a problem with except for when it comes to one certain thing in math that I just can’t make sense of as being considered logical:
Rounding of decimals.
To my understanding, the rule is that when you have a decimal that is 5 or higher, you round up. If 4 or lower you round down.
Two things that I don’t understand about this:
1. When you round up, you magically pull value out of the air that wasn’t there to begin with, and do the opposite when rounding down. How is this considered logical?
2. The rule isn’t applied universally. I’ve seen cases when, for example, making store purchases, no matter how low the decimal, it is rounded up and not down.
I appreciate any help you guys can give. Thank you in advance for the assistance! <3
In: 6
“Rounding” is less mathematics than it is a useful convention for counting things. It’s not based in mathematical logic, but rather just rules we set up for counting things.
The rounding your describe is the type that we use in counting things when we want to make adding up numbers in our head easier, but still get close to the real number.
There’s another type of rounding where you simply take a value between two others and count it as the greater value, called “rounding up”. People do it for things like planning food for a party where they prefer to over-estimate how much to buy so that they don’t run out of food by buying too little.
Sometimes people do the opposite, “rounding down” by taking the lower number with the understanding that they are under-estimating. People do this when buying big boxes of stuff to make sure that they don’t buy so much that it goes to waste.
People also round off by irregular amounts, not just haves. If you cook and you need to change how much of a recipe you make, you multiple or divide the ingredient amounts in the recipe to adjust how much you make. The problem is that your spoons and measuring cups only come in so many sizes, so sometimes your just round off to the nearest whatever-size-scoop-thing-I-have of an ingredient. It applies anywhere that things come in fixed “chunks” or units of a given size and you can’t or don’t want to break it up.
Mathematics, however, can describe the error in using each method, the assumptions you make about the distribution of the things you are counting, etc.
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