The Maths You Need to Survive AI — and Nobody’s Teaching You

A Survival Toolkit, Not a Gift From the Gods

Despite centuries of progress on real-world problems, we still teach math as if it were handed down from the heavens, rather than shaped, reworked, and repurposed by real people solving real issues in their own time. In the so-called hard sciences, old myths and Platonic ideas have long been pushed aside in teaching. But in mathematics? It’s still too often presented as eternal, unchanging truth.

We often overlook that math, much like chemistry or biology — empirically grounded sciences designed to solve real-world problems — is basically a tool, shaped and remixed by real-world needs through history, not handed down as an eternal cosmic revelation.

Want proof?

In the 17th century, the global economy ran on ships. Sea trade was the system. Empires raced for spices, gold, and land; the only way to get them was by navigating dangerous oceans. Latitude? Easy — measure the Sun or stars. Longitude? A killer. Without accurate clocks (though John Harrison’s marine chronometer would eventually emerge), sailors had no reliable way to track east-west travel. Guess wrong, and you disappeared.

That pressure sparked invention.

John Napier gave navigators a lifeline: logarithmic tables that turned endless multiplications into additions. He built an analog computing tool — on paper — that saved time and reduced errors.

Then Isaac Newton took on the next big problem: planetary motion. To track accelerating bodies on elliptical orbits, averages weren’t enough. You needed to measure change at every instant. So he invented calculus , not to write poetry, but to solve real problems in navigation, astronomy, and motion.

This wasn’t math for math’s sake. It was math built for survival.