Margaret

My younger brother who is a math grad student sent me this article
about math and the kind of math that is not memorizing multiplication
tables. He thought that was interesting and I thought it might be
interesting to people here as well.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1999/math-0512.html

It also reminded me of a story that I remembered about Enrico Fermi,
who was a very accomplished physicist, walking into a freshman physics
class and asking them how many piano tuners there are in Chicago. He
ends up answering the question with a series of reasonable estimates
(how many people are in Chicago, how many families, what proportion of
the families have pianos, how often they are tuned, how long it takes
to tune a piano, how many hours a piano tuner would work in a year).
All of these were rough guesses based on reasonable assumptions but
they give you a good ballpark answer to a question that you would
think you

In terms of "real world math", questions like this really do come up
(e.g. how many seeds are in the pomegranate that we are eating) but I
can see it being very easy not to have an answer as this isn't how
schools teach math and may not be how many adults are used to looking
at the world this way.

a book of essays, one of which has this story: (The Fermi Solution)
http://www.amazon.com/Fermi-Solution-Hans-Christian-Baeyer/dp/0486417077
an article about it:
http://physics.suite101.com/article.cfm/fermi_problems_physics_estimation

For some reason, it also reminds me (looser commection) to the
statistics story about the lady tasting tea. That is another nice
story and there is a book meant for the general public that has that
story as well as other stories about statistics. (The Lady Tasting
Tea)
http://www.amazon.com/Lady-Tasting-Tea-Statistics-Revolutionized/dp/0805071342/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225900341&sr=1-1