Applied Mathematics

I am an English Language major. Please note that I am not an English major; there exists a distinction, and both I and English majors everywhere feel it keenly. Either way, I am certainly not a mathematics person, and in fact have never studied mathematics since I was seventeen. 

So it was with some surprise that I found myself at three-forty in the morning behind the half-wall of my dispatch console some years ago, slaving away at mathematics. Geometry, in point of fact. Cylindrical volume, to be even more precise. Why? Because work issued a challenge.

It may not sound like a challenge, more a game, really, but to a tired but idle mind at three-oh-seven in the morning, it sounded like a challenge. And all dispatchers love a challenge. They may lie to you and say they don't, but by dint of even being a dispatcher in the first place, they really do. The challenge in this case was quite simple: estimate how many M&Ms were in a glass jar without opening the jar. The person who guessed nearest the actual number without going over would win the jar. 

I must add here that this is not the type of challenge I have ever engaged in. The mental energy it requires is not of my natural skill set and the prize is paltry at best. But at three-oh-nine that morning, I had given in to curiosity. The curiosity not of how many M&Ms were in the jar, or even the curiosity of whether or not I could guess closest to the number without going over. But rather, the curiosity of seeing the task properly undertaken.

See, by three-oh-three that morning, I had already become quite fed up with the lineup of attempts already demonstrated. Twenty-six guesses had already been entered and I had witnessed half of them as co-workers simply walked up to the jar, shook it, eyeballed it thoroughly and then came to the floor to discuss their ideas about possible numbers. This irritated a portion of my soul because the means to come up with an educated guess were all quite apparent, yet nobody seemed to be taking advantage of them.

So at three-thirteen, I took a ruler to the kitchen and began taking measurements. Diameter of the base, height of the jar, perceived thickness of the glass at the base of the jar, perceived thickness of the side glass of the jar. Shorthand calculations to reach an estimated actual volume of the jar's interior. Set! So much for the container. Then I began counting M&Ms. Not individual ones, no no. Just the layers. I counted down - fourteen. I counted from the base up - fourteen. I shook and resettled the jar and repeated. Fourteen, and fourteen and a half. I decided fourteen was enough. Then I realized this information was, in fact, useless and that I was an idiot who needed only to determine the settlement ratio of plain M&Ms.

Did you know people actually spend time determining the settle density of various candies? I did not, but I had assumed somebody would because people do everything now-a-days and then post it online so that tired dispatchers at three-twenty-six in the morning can benefit from the exhaustive fruits of their labor. The settlement ratio of plain M&Ms is 0.685, for your future reference.

Now, not being a regular maths person, it took me until four-seventeen to come up with the same answer three times in a row and to assure myself that the mathematics I had used to achieve these results was sound. The difficulty I now faced was that I had a decimal answer. But by now I had also run out of the motivation to pour any more energy into this task. There being no rules against a precise decimal estimation, I entered my slip of paper in the box of guesses and dusted my hands of the whole thing. You see, as far as I was concerned, I did not care to have anything further to do with the entire affair. I merely wanted to see the task done properly.

But then two weeks later the email went out that I was only off by 3 M&Ms. I was awarded the jar of 1283.5 M&Ms along with a laugh that there were no partial candies in the jar, haha.

I don't actually like plain M&Ms. Thanks, math. Thanks.