Math Geek Mom: Irrational Decisions

By Rosemarie Emanuele. In Economics, the idea of someone acting in a “rational” way implies that they make decisions that maximize their own utility, and that they do so consistently. in Mathematics, the same word means that a number can be represented as the ratio of two integers, that it can be written as a decimal that either ends or repeats forever. I found myself thinking of this recently, and the many decisions that we make in life that might be seen as “irrational”, as we approach the day the most famous irrational number is often celebrated. That number, “pi”, can approximated by its first three numbers, 3.14, and is therefore sometimes celebrated on March 14th. Read more...