Do All Our Activities Involve Mathematics? : The answer to this is 'yes' and 'no'. For those who look for mathematics and know where to look for it, it is 'yes'. For those who do not look for it, mathematics is only what they do in school, having no relationship to their real world. In other words, mathematics is not like pebbles or leaves that are lying around on the ground, waiting to be picked up. One has to dig below the surface to find it.
To understand this let us look at an example about making 'chapati'. A friend of mine, Prakash, says that there is a lot of chemistry involved in cooking 'chapatis'. What does he mean? According to him, when a 'chapati' is being cooked, it is undergoing chemical changes, like the ones he studied about in school in the "chemistry class".
However, another friend of mine says that when she makes a 'chapati', she is more interested in the various shapes the dough takes under the rolling pin. She also likes to discover the relationships between the movement of the pin and these shapes. So, she sees mathematics in the very same process that Prakash sees chemistry in.
What this example shows is that an activity, incident or phenomenon can be looked upon and studied from several angles. If we look for the mathematics in it, we will find it. Once we have our 'mathematical eyes' open and we start noticing rules and patterns, we can see mathematics in almost everything-a song, a story book, the path taken by a fly while buzzing around, the shape of a -match-box and the number of its surfaces, the proportion of paper required to cover these surfaces, electric wiring in your house, patterns in leaves, and so on. In particular, all children's activities and experiences are steeped in mathematics.