It was an unconventional way how it all came together for me to end up in surveying, but I enjoyed math from a very young age. I remember starting school in Bolivia at 5 years old and almost immediately we were tasked to learn the 10x tables (don't think that necessarily happens so early nowadays), and within a very short time I had it down pat, not sure if by memory or understanding but it irritated the teacher as I recall. From there, fast forward to high school and I found out that I really enjoyed the "applied" mathematics more than anything, to be able to put an equation to a something that you see in front of you was just fantastic in my mind. Dropped out because of boredom in high school, started working construction jobs for minimum wage and long hours. Another few years pass, one day I see a survey crew doing their thing at a construction site I was working at, and observed them for a while and this little light bulb went off "Hey, wait a minute, they are doing something that is interesting, I could do that!". Completed my GED (government equivalency diploma in Manitoba Canada, for those that didn't graduate high school) and applied to get into a college program that had a surveying option. Got accepted, loved it, and started working in land surveying on Vancouver Island thereafter. While in college I also got really interested in writing software and understanding the numbers in more detail that our software does for us when we click a button, and after about 8 years surveying I find myself working for a software company. Now, the twist to this whole story is that I found out only two or three years ago that my grandfather had surveyed and divided large sections of land in Bolivia in the 1970's not because he was a surveyor but because he had an affinity for mathematics that nobody else had within the area. Needless to say there was no governing association for the work he did. The brutal physical labour involved in the jungles of South America was not seen as overly glamorous by the family and nobody bothered to mention it until they realized I had actually "chosen" to do that type of work.
I was always good at math until calculus. But I also stopped trying around that age.
Now as a surveyor....what's math?
There is no math left in these days with computersome and collectors.
Geometry yes. Algebra. No. But as someone said above its more just visualizing in my head the geometry of a puzzle I'm trying to solve.
It's more like solving a puzzle to me now rather than mathematical.
I did high level maths all the way through school and university but got into surveying purely because I liked maps.
Practically I use very little of the maths I learned (and mostly forgotten through lack of use).
There was one calculus proof that illustrates the absurdity of some maths that I will always remember, and that was we could prove that a sphere had a finite volume but an infinite surface area! Crazy really.
Seb, post: 345236, member: 7509 wrote: I did high level maths all the way through school and university but got into surveying purely because I liked maps.
Practically I use very little of the maths I learned (and mostly forgotten through lack of use).
There was one calculus proof that illustrates the absurdity of some maths that I will always remember, and that was we could prove that a sphere had a finite volume but an infinite surface area! Crazy really.
I had a physics professor once that I really enjoyed. He was full of stuff like you've mentioned. Once he got off on a rant about the error of published constants used in all sorts of everyday calcs, like friction co-efficient. Out of our textbook he took a friction co-efficient of smooth ice. He then backed into a formula to calculate how long it would take a sliding object (car) to eventually stop on the ice.
The details escape me, but he proved there existed a combination of vehicle weight and speed, that when calculated, indicated the vehicle would never stop. Which is, of course, impossible in the real world. He was cautioning us against a blind reliance on merely the math.
And this was actually before the widespread use of computers. If he's still alive I bet this world drives him crazy nowadays....
I've always found applied math interesting and excelled over my classmates in it, from a fairly early age.
I recall riding the school bus and being bored. Not sure what year, but probably Jr High. Seeing an older kid's Algebra I book, I wondered what Algebra was, so borrowed it for the rest of the ride and got the basic concept of what X was for, how to solve very simple equations, and thought that was pretty neat.
I showed some interest in surveying-related topics, too, but followed a different career path, since I also always tinkered with machines and electricity.
In high school on that bus ride, I saw smoke in the distance, and tried to work out how far away it was by the distance traveled on the "square" section line roads to change it from 30 degrees to 45 degrees (didn't every farm kid know about sections?). Having no angle measure or calculator it was a pretty crude but turned out to give me a pretty good guess.
The weekly county newspaper published a list of the real estate transactions, and I learned to figure out in the plat book which quarter-quarter section the neighbor had sold.
Somewhere around here I still have the 50-year old paper where in high school I tried to work out the latitude and longitude of our house by counting mile sections from a labeled lat-lon point on the map of the Corps of Engineers impoundment in the next county. Hand-multiplication. Turns out to be over a mile off, but still an accomplishment that nobody else in my class would have attempted.
I did well in most college math, and informally tutored others in calculus and differential equations, but only managed matrix algebra by rote (since have gained some intuition about it). Probability and statistics was hard work, but I gained an intuition for it that is more valuable than calculus, and something that I think more people should understand. I was on the edge of losing my footing in rings, groups, and fields for lack of physical examples. Since then I have frequently used, and retain, algebra and simple calculus, but never diff-EQ or group theory.
Holy Cow, post: 345212, member: 50 wrote: Practical application is what so many teachers leave out of their presentations. Probably because the path to becoming a math teacher requires no practical experience whatsoever. Too many teach math the same as they would teach a foreign language. I remember begging my Algebra II teacher for some practical applications and she chose to ignore the request. Nitwit. Fortunately for the multitudes that turned out to be her only year as a high school math teacher.
Her replacement had just left the military where he had acquired extensive experience at making projectiles land where they are supposed to land. He made geometry and advanced math fun.
When he grew tired of the hassles that some call being a school employee he went into running a dairy with his other bachelor brothers. He's now 70 and still loves milking cows.
Your experience highlights a big challenge in math education. Nowadays, the jargon is "make math relevant."
In my high school and college days, math classes taught theory and concepts. Applications were taught in other courses; physics and chemistry for most of us. I learned proportions in chemistry, but I would never have understood why cross multiplication worked without the equation-solving principles from algebra. Similarly, I learned the law of cosines and law of sines along with vectors in physics, but that would not have made sense without the basic grounding in trig from algebra 2. Statistics came in a different order, applications first in a business statistics class and mathematical theory studying for the second actuarial exam.
In the last school I taught in, physics was not offered nor was general chemistry. AP Chemistry was offered, but only a few students enrolled. So those two avenues for applications were limited or nonexistent.
STEM, the acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, is an important concept. Math majors need courses in the STE part to solidify their knowledge of mathematics. But finding applications that students can understand for, say quadratic equations, will remain a challenge.
Math is a great tool. The more tools you have the more you can do. I cannot make myself get interested in math theory. It was not until after high school installing material handling equipment that I had the revelation that there is a mathematical relationship to everything I was doing. Until I saw the power of math in the real world, I only used math to determine how much change I should be getting. Now I use math just enough to solve real word problems. In my free time, I would rather read a biography or about history. So to me, math is more of a necessity than a love.
I was a terrible math student and ended up failing downward until I got out of school with the "consumer math" level education. I keep a mean checkbook.
I picked the Field Artillery Surveyor MOS from one of two giant books that an Army recruiter flopped out on a table. The other one opened to Engineer, as in train driver.
In the Army survey school, the bits of math I did retain began to coalesce as we worked through the base-level coordinate geometry. I struggled to catch up. You had to have a very high GT score for the MOS, but I was an illiterate when it came to the maths.
The difference for me was that I could now see a concrete purpose for the math. I know I'm not alone in being at class thinking "when will I ever need this". Even now, when asked what I do for a living I often reply with a question: "Remember all that math from high school you thought you'd never use?"... I do that.
The licensure tests were tough for me. It was sheer brute force rote learning for me to get it down. I still don't have true depth of understanding but I can do all the calcs I need by hand with a log book if I have to. I still consider myself a high-functioning illiterate when it comes to higher math.
I think that if the math had been made relevant to some real world use, I may have grasped some concepts rather than just the numbers. I have done a presentation for young kids where we use very simple angle and distance comps to find half-dollars that I have planted and pre-surveyed. They get that REAL quick.
Sometimes, when it's 97 degrees and 87% humidity and I've just pulled another tick out of my hair, I hear a train whistle........
Math first for sure,,,,
Astrophysics in college, but wanted to play sports,,,,,,probably a bad combination, lol
Surveying as a summer job, then morphed into more of a job as the company I worked for got a number of big (and fun) contracts.
Surveying math was never an issue, mostly it's very basic, until you get into spherical trig., spirals, least squares, used to love doing solar reductions, I would sit in the truck with the little book and do them during lunch in the field.
But now I lost most math skills, you figure out ways to avoid it anymore, LS is just a button push, all the calcs for volume, coordinates, areas are also a button push away, haven't done a solar in years, and don't really care to.
Times move on, we are scanning old field books and in them are many of my calcs, from areas, solars, coordinates, adjustments, double prorates, all the level runs and all those adjustments, don't do any of that anymore.
I'd much rather spend my time with a brush and a shovel in the field, than any time in the office.
Algebra I & II and geometry were not really a problem in high school. Decided to take trigonometry in junior college. It was a "new math" class. It made absolutely NO SENSE at all! I either flunked or dropped the class, but I still wanted to learn trigonometry.
In the bookcase at home, I found my Dad's college trigonometry book from the early 1940's (maybe 6"X8" and 1/2 inch thick). Not a very big book, but as soon as I opened it up, it all made sense, and fit right in with geometry. This book laid out many practical applications along with how to resolve them. Wow!
I was hooked and self taught myself trigonometry using that book, and it still proudly sits in my bookcase at work.
(An aside about geometry in high school: When I was about 15, in my first quarter of geometry, I got a D- and a note home to my parents. A parent-teacher-student meeting immediately followed. I was devastated! I had never had any problems in high school....until now. I promised to work harder and I did. In the second quarter, I got a D+. This teacher, because I had applied myself, entered my semester grade as a C-. I have never forgotten how he rewarded my effort! My next two quarters were a B- and A-, with a semester grade of a solid B+.)
That magic software that most utilize routinely has removed the majority of the laborious number crunching out of the day to day life of the surveyor. But, the core of our thinking, beyond the legal aspects, relies on our ability to think along the lines of a mathematician. It may geometry or trigonometry or significant digits or any one of a number of subjects addressed in our various math classes. But, if we are not familiar with those things and functional with them we are no better off than I would be trying to read Russian without being knowledgeable in the cyrillic alphabet.
I was terrible at algebra in high school, mostly because I was disinterested in it. Around 18 I worked for a surveyor and enjoyed the job of a Rodman and occasionally working as an instrument man. After serving in the Army I decided I wanted to return to surveying as a profession because it was the work I loved as a civilian. I began school taking math as a consequence of wanting to be a surveyor, and I bought in to the hype of how hard calculus would be. Truthfully, I never enjoyed math until after taking calculus and Calc based physics simultaneously. I didn't do well in either course, but I kept my nose down and passed them both. In 2 weeks I'll finish calculus 3, and next year I'll take a few more courses in ordinary differential equations, linear algebra, numerical analysis, and foundational proofs. Those will compliment my studies in geodesy and highway and construction.
To answer your question more concisely, I came to college to get a degree that would allow me to become a surveyor. Now I'm double majoring in that program and mathematics because the math is fun and I'm out of electives to take. Surveying led me to something I can study in school and autonomously for the rest of my life if I wish to.
Agreed. My interest in most of the "advanced math" will stop once it diverges from anything applicable
I remember a hot, summer day in 1987 when I opened my nephew's mind to how simple math can be applied in almost everything we do. He had just turned 13 and was helping me haul small square bales of hay from a triangular field adjacent to a set of railroad tracks. We were taking a short break near the midpoint of the hypotenuse as we had just completed everything to the south of us but still had everything to the north to go. He said something like, "I'll bet we're half done." I countered with, "We are only one-fourth done." He asked, "How can tell?". That lead to a series of questions for him to answer that fit with his knowledge level, starting with, "How long is this field north and south?" "A half mile.", he said. "And, how wide is it on the north end.", I continued. "A quarter mile.", he said. We continued with such basic questions until it hit him that there were 30 acres north of where we were but only 10 to the south. He suddenly realized that there was value in all those silly math problems he had been doing in school.
Many of my colleagues gave me strange looks when I would say that the further modern families get from farms and farming, the harder it becomes for children to learn math. Fence posts have to be squared (made perpendicular), work required depends on the area of the field, water is a volume concept, low gears look different from high gears, etc., etc. Things that are "common sense" to farm kids are often difficult concepts for city kids.
My dad ran a furniture factory and was never without a measuring tape, so guess what I was proficient at from an early age. The one colleague I had who understood what I was saying had a father who was a shop teacher. Numbers and numerical operations were "common sense" to both of us because we were raised in numerical homes.
Good math teachers can teach from problems to theory or from theory to problems, depending on the characteristics of a class and the content to be taught. HC, it's never too late to become a teacher!
I loved Maths, geometry and algebra, but when school leave came I'd had enough of exams so applied to local farm merchandise shop for a shop job.
They refused that as I was "too qualified".
I loved the outdoors so decided to be a park ranger with the government.
Nope - too qualified.
But they suggested a career in surveying and the rest followed.
I'd only ever imagined of being an archaeologist in my younger days and surveying (I soon discovered) had that aspect rolled up in delving into and uncovering old survey history, marks etc.
Surveying never entered my head, even when dad has our farm surveyed I wasn't interested.
Never regret(ted) one moment of my career.
how times change.
I (any others) could have had the pick of multitude of jobs, just pick and chose.
Not so nowadays.
Through the centuries most children were directly connected to the work performed by their parents and other older relatives. Sometimes they helped. Sometimes they merely observed. Nevertheless, they could see what factors influenced those endeavors. Today's children are almost entirely disconnected from those learning opportunities.
The key was much like learning about language. When it is all around you, all the time, you pick it up rather easily. The more isolated the learner, the bigger the challenge.
One advantage of my job is we have the field notes and computation sheets of my predecessors. Often the old Record of Survey maps don't have any explanation of why a monument was set there or there is an apparent drafting error to track down.
In the 1960s Surveyor's typically weren't big on words but reviewing their computations can offer an insight into what they were doing. I have one now where the distance of roughly west 659 feet and change doesn't work with the bearing/distance about 1320 south to the 64th corner on the C/L of Section. I pulled out the comp sheet. He has the distance correct, the bearing correct, the cosine is correct, the sine is correct but the latitude and departure are both incorrect. There are little red check marks next to the numbers indicating it was checked so I don't know what the heck happened. Everything else on the page checks. We did find a monument because I found it in the notes. It was used as a traverse point but disregarded as a monument, nothing about it on the R/S. The notes have a bearing and distance because the new monument was set from the old monument.
[USER=94]@Math Teacher[/USER] .That's generally a factor in much of today's living.
There's little incentive to be aware of anything spatially.
Supermarkets (here) have every item broken down to cost per volume, weight etc.
Distances are something you read off a GPS, Google etc or just follow your IPhone.
I've always believed those who live in the cities and disconnected from the land are more likely to be lacking in many life skills.
That's an observation made from many planning applications and working with planners with little or no understanding of life beyond the concrete, steel and bitumen landscapes they call home.
Edit. This was a response to a couple of posts above. Not sure how it ended here.
Surveying? Was to pay the bills, as I did my favorite thing..... Where is that pic of the chicken, and the egg, and the chicken is smoking.....
Surveying. It's a way of life, not really a job. A job is what you get at the dollar store!
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