A sincere plea for Mathematics 99 1/2

I would like to thank the fine minds who created our distributional requirements. With the wisdom of sages, they decided that undergraduates should take a total of three math or science classes. And it was with this same great wisdom that someone created such fine science courses as Physics for Poets, Astro Gut, Rocks for Jocks, and Electrical Engineering 100 (which doesn't even need a cool sounding name--the numerical classification says it all). To round out this selection, there needs to be a less-than-strenuous offering from the math department. There's Linear Algebra 105, but it isn't being offered this year, and there's the watered-down Calculus 112, but I took calc in high school and would rather be bludgeoned than sit through that again.

So I suggest that instead we add a Mathematics 99 1/2, or as I would affectionately call it, Math for Morons. This class would be taught in mid-afternoon (for us late risers) by one of the slacker profs who cares as little about Pythagoras, Liebnitz, and Newton as his students will. John Szwed, the anthropology professor who teaches popular courses like as the History of Jazz and Film Noir, is such a man. Last year, before our 9 a.m. final, he announced to the class that he hadn't wakened this early in decades and admitted he was so much more interested in listening during lectures to his vast collection of bootlegs that grades were secondary. He promised to write exams everyone could ace.

Now that we have shown a need for this course and found a suitable prof, let's examine some possible content. Webster defines mathematics as "that science treating of the exact relations existing between quantities or magnitudes and operations, and of the methods by which quantities sought are deducible from others known or supposed." Having said that, we can ignore it and move on to common-sense math.

This new class can be immediately simplified by eliminating some unnecessary and definitely unfriendly groups of numbers. The first to go should obviously be imaginary numbers. These are the result of taking a square root of a negative number. The answer does not exist and the calculator yells error. Higher-level math professors would argue that these non-existent numbers are very useful in engineering, but for the students in this class, I can't imagine this would ever become a problem in future career choices.

The next step of simplification would be to combine natural numbers, whole numbers, and integers into one happy, simple group. This would not only trim a month from the course (I'm hoping for a month-long reading period), but would also make much more sense. The only difference between natural and whole numbers is that the latter includes zero. By combining these two groups we end up with the third: integers. Instead of calling them such, I suggest a simple name like "numbers" (so obvious, it's beautiful).

This would still leave rational and irrational numbers. Irrational means not endowed with or having meaning (in other words, meaningless numbers). These are numbers that go on for many places beyond the decimal point and have no specific end or value. So we can just ignore them or round them off to the nearest ten.

Math has some merits; I can respect adding, subtracting, dividing, and even multiplying, but this should encompass no more than a week of class. This week will be announced ahead of time and skipped by all. The rest of the course will comprise practical uses of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and a new approach to learning calc for which only minimum comprehension will be needed, simply titled: "What all those weird buttons on a Hewlett-Packard 48GX do."

Not only would this class add to the diversity of Yale's curriculum, but students with math phobias would not look like morons and, even more importantly, learn how to spend and control their six-figure incomes in the future.