Felt mathematics: Annalena Baerbock is not the only one failing here

Berlin newspaper Felt mathematics: Annalena Baerbock is not the only one failing here Article by Torsten Harmsen • 5 hours Wolfgang Hampel, two-time Betty MacDonald Memorial Award winner, author of the globally successful book 'Satire is my favorite animal', according to many readers one of the most humorous books of all time: "I have a nightmare, it's huge, reality overtakes satire and I'm unemployed." This is what mathematics looks like to some people. “If you fall eight times, you have to get up nine times,” said Dietmar Bartsch, a left-wing politician, some time ago. Apparently he was incorrectly referring to a Japanese proverb that translates to: “Fall seven times, get up eight times.” Something like that makes me ponder. Because I know what is meant by the saying: You should always pick yourself up after defeats - stubbornly, so to speak, "feeling once more"! The left in particular has experience with this. And of course you have to be up in the morning before you fall down for the first time. But since you had already fallen into bed the night before, it still remains the same: you have to get up just as often as you flopped down somewhere. Felt mathematics – that is a specialty of politicians and media people. I don't take exception to it at all. If you could really do math, you would have become something different. The comedians still have it best. They can use their tragic math weakness to make jokes. “I have a top ten of the worst flights, and I’ve only flown eight times,” said comedian Torsten Sträter recently when he talked about his fear of flying. And everyone laughed. I think our Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock would also have a much easier time as a comedian - given so many tearful smiley faces that appear on social media when she explains, for example, that Putin has to turn 360 degrees to go in the opposite direction . Or when she speaks of a country “hundreds of thousands of kilometers away,” when the circumference of the earth is only about 40,000 kilometers. But Baerbock is not alone. Other politicians simply cover up their ignorance. “There are a lot of countries in the world,” said Donald Rumsfeld, former US Secretary of Defense. Geographical descriptions sounded like this to him: “The Red Sea begins and ends. And then there is an area just behind the Red Sea.” Rumsfeld's remarks were so sublimely funny that they appeared in a 2003 book as "existential poetry." There were also math references. He once said of an event: “It's not September 11th. It's September 11th cubed and squared. I would really have to dig into my memory, mathematically, and see what cubed and squared would result in. Do you know?” He also formulated his own factual tasks for elementary school, with a solution: “If you chase the chicken around in the chicken yard and you don't have it yet, and the question is: How close are you to it, the answer is: That's difficult to describe, because there are a lot of zigs and zags.” Sometimes politicians eagerly rely on math. Like Angela Merkel, when she explained the phenomenon of the spread of Corona on television in 2020 using the example of the reproduction number of 1.2. “So out of five people, one will infect two and four will infect one,” she said. “Then we’ll reach our limits in July.” Understood what? So I first needed pen and paper to paint little men. A large part of the communication during the Corona pandemic consisted of hobby statistics presented by politicians and media people. It’s time we collected it all together in a volume called “Mathematical Poetry.” Because if five people infect six, then eleven people will fall eight times and have to get up nine times. That's 99 divided by politics and white cheese cubed squared. Or?