I'm not surprised that this article is pretty divisive on Hacker News. > I find it difficult to find anyone who uses more than Excel and eighth grade level mat

I'm not surprised that this article is pretty divisive on Hacker News. > I find it difficult to find anyone who uses more than Excel and eighth grade level mathematics (=arithmetic, and a little bit of algebra, statistics and programming) I think even that's a bit optimistic; I think people whose further studies or jobs don't require that level of mathematics forget it pretty quickly. For a base level of "everyday life," you probably only need basic arithmetic operations. As anecdotal evidence, look to all those times that a relatively convoluted expression is posted on Facebook or Reddit and people argue for weeks about what the proper solution is. Of course there's plenty of people who get it right, but the wrongs range from a subtle misunderstanding of order of operations to a complete lack of knowledge about it.