Male Narrator: Funding for this program is provided in part by... Female Narrator: We believe in getting outside, playing in the yard, growing things, and connecting with the earth.

We believe good can grow anywhere.

That's why we're committed to GroMoreGood, everywhere.

Male Narrator: And also by... Hi, friends.

I'm Caroline, and this is How It's Math, where we discover the surprising ways math shows up in the real world and in amazing careers.

Today, we have a very special episode all about the math behind everyday life, things you might see or experience all the time.

First, we're heading to a landfill where math helps manage waste using measurement, multiplication, and problem solving.

Next, we'll go behind the scenes at a movie theater to see how decimals and numbers are used to track tickets, snacks, and sales.

After that, we'll meet an author and discover how math helps track big ideas, organize information, and even work with large numbers in the writing process.

Finally, we'll visit a pharmacist where precision and metric conversions are all used to make sure people get the correct and safe amount of medicine.

From landfills to movie theaters to books and medicine, you're about to see that math isn't just something you do in school, it's something people use every single day to solve real world problems.

Let's get started.

♪ Doodly doodle doodly doodle ♪ ♪ Doodly doodles and digits ♪ ♪ Area symmetry fractions too ♪ ♪ It's all here for you ♪ Are you ever curious about what happens after you throw out a piece of trash?

Well, today we get to go behind the scenes of a landfill and a recycling center to see what happens after you put that piece of trash in a trash can.

Carolina: It involves a ton of math.

Let's get into it.

What is a landfill?

A landfill is a large outdoor site where waste is buried in layers of earth.

Hi, I'm Mohammad Ali.

I'm the Engineering Manager for WM.

Landfills are spread out.

It varies from 100 acres or 50 acres to hundreds of acres.

Mohammad Ali: Or if you are in a flat area, you could see a big mound as you drive around in a grassy mound.

So I'm Erick Palmer.

I'm the Area Disposal Manager.

I get to hang out at a lot of landfills.

I'm Karen Factor.

I'm the Area Collection Manager for WM in the Buckeye Market area in central Ohio.

What does a typical day look like in your career?

You think about the truck behind me, we pick up maybe 1,000 homes a day.

You see that arm moving and picking up those carts.

A day in a life of our landfill starts pretty early.

Around 5:00 in the morning, we have a group of folks that are here Erick Palmer: and they operate the heavy equipment.

At some point in the day, a second crew comes in, typically that's around 8:00 in the morning, and they start mining dirt out of the ground.

So there's a big excavator that's filling really big trucks.

They're delivering dirt to the working face so that we can make sure that we cover the waste every single night.

Then you have a group of folks like myself and Ali who come in.

We monitor the performance of the landfill.

Then at the end of the day our customers leave.

Our frontline team begins to cover and finish up covering up everything.

We have gas techs that are out there monitoring the gas and making sure we're getting the -- all the gas we can to the plant.

How do you use math?

It probably starts with the customer.

When we're deciding to take and receive their waste materials, we have to know how much they're going to send us.

We spend a lot of time in the operations focused on perimeter and area and square footage so we know exactly how much to place in certain areas.

Our collection vehicles are all equipped with computers, and those computers measure and track Karen Factor: from the hours that our drivers and employees work, to the number of homes that they service every day, to the actual weight of the material that they pick up.

That truck can hold up to 10 tons of material.

We measure how many pounds per home, so that information helps us determine how many trucks we need on a street on a daily basis.

Maybe you have 10 routes a day, so that's 10,000 homes a day.

What does structure have to do with a landfill?

I call landfill is like a mega structure.

It has a foundation.

When we design a landfill, there's a -- Mohammad Ali: it has a certain shape.

You know, whether it could be a rectangle shape.

As you place the waste and compact and cover it, then you got to ensure that it has stability that goes with that.

So what does happen after you throw out a piece of trash?

The journey of waste is something that's been documented.

It's kind of interesting.

Materials that eventually reach this spot could be 80 miles away.

So you eat your apple Erick Palmer: and you place your core in the waste can.

That can then traverses down to the end of the street, or goes down to the end of the street at your house, and it gets picked up on a truck.

And that truck drives onto a scale and we weigh that truck.

And then it's taken up to the top of the hill where we place it into the waste mass.

So we bring it in with all the other waste.

Then what happens is we close that up at the end of the day by putting dirt on top of it and sealing it in there.

And there are these tiny little bugs that go in and start eating stuff.

And those bugs create methane gas, and then we take the gas and we pipe it over, in some cases, to a power plant.

Mohammad Ali: We use the landfill gas in different variety of ways, generating electricity by running turbines, applying vacuum through drilling wells to the waste mass and collecting the gas.

Where we turn it into electricity to power your homes.

In other cases, we pipe it into a gas line Erick Palmer: that actually is taken to your house and it heats your house.

The objects that you put in a recycling bin will go to a recycling center.

A recycling center also uses a lot of math.

Some of the math that a recycling center uses are figuring out the weight of items coming in, how much they're recycling, the data of how efficient they are, and also how many tons per hour that they are recycling.

This recycling center actually can recycle up to 420 tons per day.

Caroline: That is a lot of recycling.

When you recycle, you're giving your trash a new life.

Recycled items are turned into all sorts of things, such as cans, paper, new bottles, toys, and even park benches.

It's really incredible what recycling can do.

The waste trucks pick up 10,000 homes in a day in one area.

How many homes' trash will they pick up after seven days?

[clock ticking] 70,000 homes' trash.

I did seven times 10,000 homes, and that equals 70,000.

70,000 homes' trash.

Did you get it correct?

A lot of people to this date don't know what we do.

I mean, a lot of people think, you know, we are a garbage company.

People don't have a good understanding of how that is managed.

It's a -- it's a lot of science that gets involved.

It's a lot of technology that's involved in it.

People are really surprised to learn how inside us capturing that waste, Erick Palmer: what we're doing to create renewable energy.

When they finally understand what a modern landfill actually is, they're a little bit flabbergasted, and certainly they're a lot more confident in what we do every day, that's for sure.

I think the best advice I give to everyone is to do what you enjoy doing.

If you like math, follow that where your calling is and work with people that enjoy math, and do the things that you love to do.

I'm an Engineering Manager at WM.

I'm an Area Disposal Manager, -and that's How It's Math.

-That's How It's Math.

Do you love movies?

I know I do.

Today, we get to go behind the scenes of a theater to see how they use math every single day.

From figuring out how much a ticket costs to pricing the popcorn, math is used in almost every aspect of a theater.

Join me as we go behind the scenes of a theater to see How It's Math.

Let's get into it.

My name is Ryan Bowie, and I'm the Executive Director at the Avalon Theatre in Marysville, Ohio.

The Avalon Theatre is a non-profit cultural arts center.

We do a wide variety of events, from classic films to comedians to concerts to live plays.

You name it, we do it here at the Avalon.

How do you use math?

The theatre itself has 236 red velvet seats.

We have several rows in the center section that have 10 seats across.

We're in multiples of 10.

And then on the side sections, we either have three or four seats coming back, depending because it kind of comes back at an angle.

We have a full concessions area that patrons use when they come in to see a show or a movie, and that requires counting money.

So a lot of times, we will take a bottle of water that might cost us a dollar, and we're going to mark that up 50% or maybe 60% so that we cover our costs, but then we're also making a little additional.

We have come up with a ticket price of $8 for all of our movies.

We want it to be affordable.

Some of our live productions are a little bit more expensive because they cost us a little bit more on the back end, and so we need to recoup some of that or pay some of those performers.

We have to deal with something that's called royalties, and that makes sure that everybody that has worked on the movie is getting paid appropriately for all of their hard work that went into it.

So let's say we're going to show a popular holiday movie, and it's going to cost me $380 for the royalties, and then make that payment back to that royalty company.

So we have movies that are coming out and we know about them, and they're going to be new releases.

They cost a lot more to show, and also they want you to show it a minimum number of times.

Sometimes they want you to run those for at least two weeks.

Sometimes one, two, three times a day, seven days a week.

Then there's other options for movies that have been around for a long time, and those are at a lesser price point.

While they are a lower price point, it also helps us justify keeping our ticket price lower.

So movies always have a runtime, one hour and 26 minutes.

One of the main reasons we use it is we do partnerships with other businesses.

There is a dessert place right next door.

It's an ice cream parlor.

If the movie starts at 2:00, the movie runs an hour and 26 minutes, they can expect to get their ice cream at 3:30-ish, depending on if they want to sit around and watch all the credits.

What advice do you have for math students?

Truth be told, I was terrible at math.

But I never thought that my day-to-day life would deal with so much addition, subtraction, fractions.

Sometimes I wish that I would've paid a little bit more attention in those classes, because you're going to need it.

You go to the movie theatre and want to purchase snacks at the concession stand.

You get two drinks and a popcorn.

The drinks cost $2.50, and the popcorn cost $3.75.

How much do you spend in total?

[clock ticking] You spend $8.75 in total.

Did you get it correct?

A lot of you probably have a local theatre somewhere in your community.

Continue to support that because it's super, super important for us as a society to have arts and cultural outlets so that we can continue to grow and we can continue to become awesome human beings.

This is the Avalon Theatre, and this is How It's Math.

When you think of an author, you probably think of words, stories, and imagination.

But did you know authors use math too?

Today on How It's Math, we're meeting an author to discover how math helps bring stories to life.

Authors use math to plan their writing, organize ideas, and manage their time.

They think about page numbers, chapter lengths, and pacing to keep readers engaged.

They track word counts, set goals and use math to make sure their stories flow just right.

From planning how long a book should be to figuring out how much time it'll take to write, math helps authors turn big ideas into finished books.

Let's see how authors use math to tell amazing stories.

Hi, I am Debbie Rigaud.

I am an author of children's literature.

I've written for young adult audiences, where I started, that's YA.

Those are teen readers.

I've written for middle grade, which is 9 to 12-year-olds, and I've just released a picture book for my earliest readers.

How did you get to the position you're at today?

Well, I was always writing.

I always kept a journal, and that's really how I expressed my feelings.

And I would fill one journal after the other.

Well, it wasn't until I was looking to get into college that my high school advisor said, "Hey, if you're looking for extra money for college, there are these essay contests."

And I started entering them and winning them.

I didn't know that this thing that I loved to do sort of naturally and I didn't know was a special thing.

And so that's how I decided to major in journalism and English when I got to school.

And from there, I'm from the New York City area, where a lot of magazines are based, and so it was a great transition to working internships at the local magazines, and that's what really got me going in that career.

How do you use math?

So when an author gets her book deal and she's super excited, the first thing is, well, what kind of book are you going to write?

What's your audience?

What category does it sit in?

And then from that, you will know, drum roll, your word count.

Word counts are something that all -- a lot of authors, we just know by heart.

We know that if you write for, for example, the teen category, YA, young adult, it's going to be -- if it's a contemporary novel, it'll probably be around 60,000 to 70,000 words.

If you are writing for 9 to 12-year-olds, that's the middle grade category, it will probably be about 40,000 to 50,000 words.

And then for my picture book, for example, about 500 words.

So the same way you have formulas in math, you sort of have formulas in storytelling.

And other formulas that you might see in storytelling is sort of the beginning, middle, and end, the theme of the story.

And also just like problem solving, you have a problem and a solution in the story.

How does math help you stay on track?

I have deadlines, and then you're like, "Okay, I have 28,000 words written.

I have to write about at least 40,000 words."

If my deadline is in one month, if I have four weeks, how many words do I have to write per week to get -- to hit that mark?

And sometimes you could even reduce it to how many words do I have to write per day to hit that mark?

So you know, by the end of the day, if you didn't hit that mark, you'll know it.

You'll say, "I'm off track a little bit.

I need to do something to catch up."

So that's how it helps me stay on task so that I can get my writing in on time.

Doesn't always happen, but I try.

I really do try.

An author is writing a new chapter book.

Her goal is to have 40,000 words total in this book, and she has written 27,000 words.

How many more words will she need to write?

[clock ticking] 13,000 words.

I subtracted 27,000 from 40,000 to get 13,000 words.

Did you get it correct?

Why is it important to be precise in your position?

If you are not precise in your writing or as close to precise as possible, you can throw off an entire team.

So although you write the novel yourself, you are working in a large team, and you are on a timeline.

And once there are delays in the planning, guess what?

Your book won't be ready in time.

Normally, they like to have your book ready six months before it hits the shelves.

If you are not precise about your deadlines, your word count, it would be just kind of a domino effect would happen.

Now that you've seen that authors don't just use imagination, they use math too.

From planning chapters and tracking word counts to setting goals and managing time, math helps authors organize their ideas and turn stories into finished books.

Every time you plan, estimate, or break up a big project into smaller steps, you're using the same math skills authors use every day.

So whether you love writing, reading, or creating stories of your own, remember that math can help you bring your ideas to life.

My name is Debbie Rigaud.

I am an author, and this is How It's Math.

Have you ever wondered how pharmacists make sure every medicine is safe and accurate?

Behind every prescription is a lot of math.

Today on How It's Math, we're heading into a pharmacy to see how pharmacists use math every single day to help people feel better.

Pharmacists use math to measure medicines, calculate doses, compare amounts, and double-check their work.

They work with numbers when counting pills, measuring liquids, adjusting prescriptions, and making sure patients get exactly what they need.

In a pharmacy, math isn't just about solving problems on paper.

It's about precision, responsibility, and real world decision-making.

Let's go see how pharmacists put math to work.

Hi, my name is Amanda and I'm a pharmacist at Uptown Pharmacy.

My name is Clara.

I am a pharmacy intern here at Uptown Pharmacy.

A pharmacist is a member of the healthcare team.

We work with doctors and nurses, dentists, even veterinarians for your pet sometimes, Amanda: and we make sure that the medications that you and your family and your loved ones need are safe for you to take and the right amount that you need.

We also help out in other ways of making sure that maybe lab values are right and medications make sense for people to take, especially if they have allergies.

How do you use math?

Amanda: So we use math every day, all day long.

Sometimes it's calculating how many tablets do we need to dispense to a patient if they're taking something once or twice a day.

Sometimes it's measuring liquids to make sure that that's the right amount.

Sometimes we're even doing math with dates to make sure that if something isn't good in 35 days, what is 35 days from today?

We also measure a lot of things here because we do something called compounding, which is making medications for you if you can't take something that is commercially available.

So if it's not available in creams, we can make it into a cream.

We can do capsules Clara: if the strength that the patient is supposed to take is not available.

And a lot of kids can't swallow tablets or capsules.

We can always make it into suspension and add flavors to it so they can take their medications.

What tools do you use when using math?

Amanda: So we use measuring in a couple different ways.

So when we are dispensing or giving out a medication that is in liquid form, we might have a big bottle of it, but you only need a little bottle.

So we'll use what's called a graduated cylinder that has markings on it, and we'll go ahead and pour the liquid in there to the correct measurement point to know how much that we need to give you.

We also use measurements in weights when we're doing compounding.

So we might need 0.2 grams of a particular medication to put in a lotion for patients to use maybe for a rash or for pain, and then we have to use our scales to measure out the right amount.

What data or numbers do you use daily?

So we are doing a lot of multiplication and division.

Clara: Each inhaler is different.

So for example, we do the math based on how many puffs is available in each inhaler.

So if an inhaler has 200 puffs, we then calculate it based on how many puffs are they using.

So if they're using two puffs and they're doing it every four hours, so that's two by six, that is 12 puffs a day.

So we do 200 divided by 12 to get how many days.

### So especially in compounding, we do do conversions, a lot of the times between milligrams and grams.

Amanda: So a medication might be written as 20 milligrams per ML, but if we're making 100 MLs of that base, we need to figure out how much do we need.

Our scale's measuring grams, so we need to figure out how many milligrams do we need total, and then when you have that number, you divide it by 1,000 to get to the grams.

You can just move the decimal point three places to the left.

Why is it important to be precise in your position?

So it's really important to be precise when you're doing math in pharmacy because sometimes just point one milliliter Amanda: can make a difference in dosing of a medication, and sometimes that means that you might take too much or too little of something, which means that you might end up with some really nasty side effects and feel really icky, or it might not work the way that we want it to.

Did you enjoy math growing up?

I loved math growing up.

I thought I was really good at it.

And I liked it because the way I looked at it was that it wasn't a problem but a puzzle, and I really, really liked solving puzzles.

What's your favorite thing about math?

There's so many ways to do math problems.

There isn't just one way to do it.

It's okay to do it in a different way as long as you're getting the right answer.

The pharmacists are measuring a prescription.

The prescription needs to be 3,000 milligrams, but their scale only measures in grams.

How many grams are equal to 3,000 milligrams?

[clock ticking] 3 grams.

There are 1,000 milligrams in one gram.

3,000 divided by 1,000 equals 3 grams.

You could also look at this metric system conversion chart and move the decimal over three places.

So now you see how pharmacists use math to do their jobs.

From measuring and calculating to checking and rechecking their work, math helps pharmacists make smart decisions, solve problems, and keep people safe.

It shows us that the math you're learning in school has a real purpose far beyond the classroom.

Whether you're adding, multiplying, measuring, or estimating, you're building the same skills professionals use every day.

I'm Amanda, and I'm a pharmacist.

My name is Clara.

I'm a pharmacy intern.

-And this is How It's Math.

-How It's Math.

Wow, look at all the ways math helps keep everyday systems running smoothly.

Today, we saw professionals use math to manage waste, track sales, organize information, and safely prepare medicine.

Carolina: Whether it was measuring, working with decimals, using large numbers, or converting units, math played an important role in every job we explored.

The next time you throw something away, go to the movies, read a book, or take medicine, remember, math is working behind the scenes to make it all possible.

Thanks for exploring with us on How It's Math.

I'm Caroline and I can't wait to discover more real world math with you next time.

Male Narrator: Funding for this program is provided in part by... Female Narrator: We believe in getting outside, playing in the yard, growing things, and connecting with the earth.

We believe good can grow anywhere.

That's why we're committed to GroMoreGood, everywhere.

And also by... Male Narrator: And also by...