Has anyone besides me noticed an over-abundance of ridiculous math metaphors? I was sitting in class today and my very well-know professor put forth a nuanced and complex argument on the subject of collaboration during World War II. He has his own theories of “collaborationism” and pulls forth meticulously gathered statistics and carefully researched points.
Now today is the Thursday before break, and by this time tomorrow I will be fast asleep in either my own bed or on the couch in front of the TV so class might not have had my full attention this morning. Nonetheless, I did hear the following argument on how to analyze the collaborators today (paraphrase):
On one hand there is the occupation vector, which is the vertical vector. At the bottom is the Jews, and at the top are the Nazis. Cutting across that is the
internal vector, which shows the political distinction’s cross-currents. On top of that, the political vector multiplies the occupation vector.
What????? Let me see if I can parse this. Ok so the vector, which is actually an axis from what I can tell, seems to portray the variable from – Germany. Negative values of this variable seem to imply the x value of the function was a jewish person, while positive values imply a Nazi. Of course, the x-axis must therefore represent people in some way. Nope, the x-axis, aka the ‘internal vector’, represents instead the politcal dinstinction of the value inputted into the function. I’ve provided a picture to help out, since you must be at least nearly as confused as I am.
So my issue isn’t with metaphor, since I think they can provide some very real insight into problems that would be otherwise much more difficult to understand. And I think (taking this as a bad metaphor) that this is not interesting only in that it helped exactly no one understand anything, and almost certainly confused many people. I’m more interested, though, in the mathematical factor. I would be surprised if this professor knew what a vector was. I can’t imagine he’s seen one since about 10th grade. I would also imagine that most people in my class thought absolutely nothing of it. How has math become so far removed from daily knowledge? I thought it came about because it was so essential to life. Instead, to the extent that people know math, they know it in the context of math-class-problems and not life. Let’s bring that back. 
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