Christy Hovanetz, Ph.D., is a Senior Policy Fellow for ExcelinEd focusing on school accountability and math policies.
Will you and your family be hitting the road this summer? Here’s a story about how math makes your trip possible. It was nearly 70 years ago—on June 26, 1956—that Congress approved the Federal-Aid Highway Act. The legislation allocated $25 billion over 13 years for constructing more than 40,000 miles of interstate highways, making it the largest public construction project to date.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower championed the idea of a “modern, interstate highway system.” He was inspired by Germany’s autobahn system and also his participation as a young officer in the U.S. Army’s 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco on the fabled Lincoln Highway—a slow, cross-county trip that took two months. President Eisenhower signed the highway act just three days after Congress passed it.
Construction began almost immediately, with tens of thousands of workers, billions of tons of gravel and asphalt…and math! Scientists and engineers used mathematical frameworks, many of which came from military operations research, for solving the complex logistics problems of creating a safe and efficient highway system.
Even today, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, and other math skills are used daily by civil engineers. Some states publish math manuals expressly for this purpose, such as the Georgia Department of Transportation’s Basic Highway Math Manual and Washington State’s Highway Engineering Field Formulas.
Beyond the math needed to build roadways, math is also needed to budget for the project, estimate the amount of materials needed, determine the exact geographic location of the road, develop a road numbering systems, calculate the necessary road grade and speed limits and a lot more. Basically, math is used in every step of the planning and construction process.
Here’s a road-related math puzzle: Back in the 18th century, a traffic flow challenge was presented to Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler. He was asked to find a route for crossing all seven bridges in a German town without crossing any bridge more than once. The challenge is known as the Seven Bridges of Königsberg, which Euler shrugged off as not a math problem.
But after mulling it over, Euler realized it was a math problem after all…and he created a whole new field of mathematics around it! In fact, the new math, called “geometry of position” (or graph theory) proved that such a route wasn’t possible. Today, graph theory is an important mathematics technique for designing networks of all kinds—including networks of highways.
Enjoy your summer travels while putting students on the road to math success by implementing ideas found in ExcelinEd’s math fundamental principles and comprehensive K-8 math model policy. Both are based on recommendations by the National Mathematics Advisory Panel.
