"I came up with a parametric formula..."Parametric forumae and equations can be incredibly useful. I remember learning about them at school but we never applied them to any realworld examples. Even at the time I recognized that without practical examples our understanding of them would be problematic.
Unfortunately, the problem with most mathematics training - especially so at high school - is the overly theoretical approach used in teaching it. It seems to me that at least in high school we should place much more emphasis on the practical application of mathematics.
The theoretical approach is all very well for the 'gifted' and those with a mathematical bent but it's often of little help to many other students. I blame this mainly on those who write the textbooks and set the syllabuses. After all, they're the ones who are good at math so they project their theoretical worldview of mathematics onto everyone else.
A classic example of the problem is the dozens of trigonometrical identities that we had to learn at school many of which were of no known practical use to us students at that stage of our training. Sure, at university they came into their own but by then one's already more adept at mathematics so they then start to make sense.
The same can happen at university too, I recall the tedium of learning vector algebra and matrixes without them being of any seeming use. At the time, no one bothered to explain how incredibly useful they are when it comes to manipulating Maxwell's equations, etc.
It's occurred to me it would be very useful if we had a website (and perhaps also in reference book form) devoted to providing mathematical solutions to thousands of realworld problems of a practical nature.
For instance, problems could be grouped alphabetically so they're easy to find. Once located, one would find various solutions to the problems (each solution using a different mathematical technique, etc.). For instance typical entries could be:
Interest, Compound
Interest, Simple
Moreover, the website could be made interesting if we also included additional mathematical information such as short biographies on famous mathematicians together with how they arrived at their discoveries, etc.
Of course, the site would be graded so as not to scare off the mathematically timid, that way it would also useful to those who are more advanced in mathematics. I envision it as a short of Wiki for math solutions.
This may not be the ideal solution to the problem and it'd be a great deal of work to set up (but like Wiki it could come together with the help of thousands of volunteers).
Unless we tackle the problem in a tangential manner - in a different and hopefully more successful approach from the past then I don't think we'll ever solve the problem.
BTW, I found parametric equations very interesting from the outset. It was obvious to me how they could overcome an impasse and thus solve some otherwise awkward problems - although I can't say I had such insight uniformly across other branches of mathematics.