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Sums?

Sums?

(OP)
Why to the British insist on saying things like "we got our sums right"? Are they not capable of any other mathematics operations? Products, logarithms, averages, differentials, integrals, Hamiltonians, Jacobians, etc.?



Best regards,

Matthew Ian Loew
"Organizations cannot make a genius out of an incompetent. On the other hand, disorganization can scarcely fail to result in efficiency." -- Dwight D. Eisenhower

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RE: Sums?

The expression is used by all sorts of non-technical people and often relates in the end to money, and we know how simple accountants like to keep things.

StephenA

RE: Sums?

Ive noticed that most accountants like it if you only give them adding to do.

RE: Sums?

I use it informally. It's a sort of self-denegrating term, "I'll go away and do the sums", Even if the maths is really quite difficult. Sadly, it sums (pardon the pun) up the low esteem in which British engineers hold themselves.

M

--
Dr Michael F Platten

RE: Sums?

Isn't understatement in general a British trait?

Hg

RE: Sums?

In summation, at the end of the day, there are a lot of expressions that the British have propagated throughout the language.


Sums are, or were, something that every person could do, while not everyone was as proficient at multiplication.

Likewise, the end of the day is indeed a period where people evaluate the events of the day and make conscious or unconscious conclusions about whether it was a good day or not.


TTFN

RE: Sums?

Well, when you consider that computers basically perform only two operations - adding (for addition and subtraction) and shifting (for multiplication and division) - when doing math at the binary level, I think the British are correct. If anything, they could amend it to:

"Have we performed our sums and shifts correctly?"

or some other variation on that theme.

xnuke

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RE: Sums?

But aren't arithmetic and maths different things?  You could do the "sums" (arithmetic operations) without going anywhere near the maths if you are just plugging numbers into formulae...

Anyway, what's wrong with colloquial English in spoken conversation?  And that's all that the expression "sum" is, after all.

Bung
Life is non-linear...

RE: Sums?

...........and so, after hearing the summation, the learned judges shall decide, unless distracted by the maths of it all, no conclusion could be reached................

RE: Sums?

The british don't always insist on saying 'we got our sums right', sometimes they'll ask that you 'go forth and multiply', depending on the situation, thus showing a wide knowledge of mathematics.

corus

RE: Sums?

Wasn't that Old TEST ament?

RE: Sums?

It all adds up, doesn't it?

(Sorry, I had to say that.)

I do a bit of bookkeeping on the side and took a beginners course in basic accounting, and most of what accountants do is add, or "sum."

RE: Sums?

(OP)
Yeah, but [i]engineers{/i]?

Best regards,

Matthew Ian Loew


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