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LISTEN: Math tricks for everyday life : Life Kit If math never quite stuck for you, Ben Orlin is here to change that. He says think of math as a language. Numbers are the nouns and the arithmetic operations are verbs. This episode, learning the language of math to help you in your day-to-day life.

Life Kit

LISTEN: Math tricks for everyday life

LISTEN: Math tricks for everyday life

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Colorful magnetic numbers and math symbols like multiplication and addition signs and arrows are arranged haphazardly on a dark gray background.
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Maryna Terletska/Getty Images
Colorful magnetic numbers and math symbols like multiplication and addition signs and arrows are arranged haphazardly on a dark gray background.
Maryna Terletska/Getty Images

If math never quite stuck for you, Ben Orlin is here to change that. Orlin is a math teacher and author of a new book, Math for English Majors. His mission is to help people see math in a more approachable way. To him, math is a language we can all learn.

His top tips:

  • Always round up when doing back-of-the-envelope math or adding things up in your head. Usually you won't need to be so precise, so getting close is good enough.
  • Remember that when mathematicians try to discover or prove new ideas, they spend a lot of time lost and confused. It's OK if you get confused by math too.
  • Being anxious and insecure about math is normal. Your mathematical prowess is not a measure of how smart you are.

This episode was produced by Gabriel Dunatov and Sylvie Douglis. The visual editor is Beck Harlan.

We'd love to hear from you. Email us at LifeKit@npr.org. Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or sign up for our newsletter.

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