Here is an example of making Math make sense and be useful….. a portion from one of the writings in the New York Time

From:

Visualizing Vastness

This style of thinking, this powers-of-10 mentality, is our best hope for making sense of the immensity of the natural world. What makes subjects like biology and climate science so hard is not just that they involve so many variables; it’s that the crucial phenomena in them occur over such a wide range of scales. Biologists need to contend with everything from nano-size DNA molecules on up to cells, organs, organisms and ecosystems. For climate scientists the relevant scales go from the molecular (the photochemistry of ozone) to the global (the fluid mechanics of the jet stream). Many of the great scientific puzzles of our time have this multiscale character.

A contentious example, especially in this election season, is inequality. The distribution of wealth in the United States spans at least 10 powers of 10, ranging from people whose net worth is measured in tens of billions of dollars, to those with barely a dollar to their names. This disparity dwarfs even the six powers of 10 in the solar system. As such, the distribution is extremely difficult to depict on a single graph, at least on the standard kinds of plots with linear axes, which is why you never see it displayed on one page.

The distribution of wealth in the United States spans at least 10 powers of 10, ranging from people whose net worth is measured in tens of billions of dollars, to those with barely a dollar to their names. This disparity dwarfs even the six powers of 10 in the solar system. As such, the distribution is extremely difficult to depict on a single graph, at least on the standard kinds of plots with linear axes, which is why you never see it displayed on one page.

Depending on your politics, you may think that wealth inequality is a problem to be solved, or irrelevant, or an encouraging sign of a free society. But whether you believe we need more inequality or less, I think we can all agree that it would be helpful to understand the actual distribution. Unfortunately its multiscale character confounds us.

This is clear from the work of Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely. In 2005 they surveyed a representative sample of more than 5,500 Americans — men and women, rich and poor, conservative and liberal, young and old — and asked them two questions: How much wealth inequality is there in America? And how much should there be, ideally?

Norton and Ariely found that people on both sides of the political spectrum grossly underestimated the extent of inequality. The typical respondent believed that the top 20 percent owned 59 percent of the nation’s wealth, much less than the 84 percent the top quintile actually owned (at the time of the survey). Respondents also thought the two quintiles at the bottom — the poorest 40 percent — owned 10 percent of the nation’s wealth, when the reality was that their two slices totaled 0.3 percent of the American pie, the two nearly invisible slivers in the chart.
Yet surprisingly, when asked to describe the ideal distribution they’d like to see, respondents of all ages, classes, genders and party affiliations agreed. They’d all prefer a distribution much less extreme than the status quo: the top quintile would hold about 32 percent of the wealth, while the poorest quintile would have over 10 percent.

It’s nice we can all agree about something for once, even if it happens to be a more equal distribution of wealth than exists in any country on Earth … and probably in our solar system.http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/visualizing-vastness/#more-134791