I Just Had to Share THIS!!!

Anyone who knows me knows that I am not a big fan of MATH. Ick. EW. No, thanks.

Well this being my senior year, and having successfully avoided taking any college math up to this point, and wanting to actually graduate, I had to enroll in a math class this term. It just seems reasonable to take the one class standing in the way of my degree and my future legal career. I shouldn't have to, but I have to. So I am taking Math 129, a survey of mathematics. It sounded interesting for math.

The first section we studied was Set Theory. I walked away understanding only one thing: Set theory relates to sets. See why I might have difficulty?

Well today we began Counting Theory. The professor explained it like this...Suppose I have a pizza restaurant. There is one guy making the dough, and you have a choice of two kinds of crust. There is one guy putting on the cheese, and you have three options for cheese. There is one guy adding the toppings, and there are six choices there. If you can only choose one option from each stage, how many possible combinations can you come up with? Well you get the answer by multiplying the groups together, so 2x3x6=36. There was more discussion, some of which involved intriguing symbols and factors that I just glazed over when I saw, but I took notes anyway, and then he asked us to solve this:

Each phone number has 10 digits, an area code and then a seven digit number. How many possible combinations are there if the first digit cannot be a 0 or a 1 and the second must be a 0 or a 1, and the remaining 8 digits can be any number between 0 and 9?

I had a breakthrough. I got it!! I actually understood what he was asking me to do (this is huge folks!) and was able to compute it!!! The answer was 1.8 Billion. How? Well 8x2x10x10x10x10x10x10x10x10=1,800,000,000. I did it! I am so proud. I have to get back to work, but I had to post it, because I know that you will be proud of me, especially my friend Oliver, whom I have neglected.