Amazing experience!

I teach university-level Cultural and Political Geography, so naturally I am deeply ignorant about math. In high school I only got as high as algebra. In college (25-ish years ago), nearly all the math I learned was lost in a sophomoric, drunken haze (Ohio University = Playboy Magazine's #1 party school 13 years running until around 1989). Two people actually cried during my U of Iowa grad school Quantitative Methods course (both of them guys) even though I aced it, but that was a Statistics course. Algebraically, I'm an idiot.

But, I occasionally encounter a problem that interests me, like the one I found in a New York Times article today that led to my trial of Mathomatic (from "Rally Defying Putin’s Party Draws Tens of Thousands," Dec. 10, 2011):

"The ruling party, United Russia, lost ground in last Sunday’s election, securing 238 seats in the next Duma, compared with the 315, or 70 percent, that it holds now. The Communist Party won 92 seats; Just Russia won 64 seats; and the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party won 56 seats."

I wanted to figure out 1) the total size of the Duma, and 2) the percentage that United Russia has now (after the tainted election). I sort of remembered how to structure the equation, but I couldn't retrieve the memory of how to solve it (though I did recall a college sweetheart's name and dorm room number). After failing with pencil and paper, I searched the term "algebra" at MacUpdate and found Mathomatic. Scowling at its Unixy interface, and never before having used any math program other than Excel and OS X's Calculator (only the Basic interface), on a whim I typed in ".7(x)=315" and hit Enter, and Mathomatic's immediate, green and black response shockingly suggested that it understood what I was after, despite the strong feeling that I'd just broken the old "Junk In = Junk Out" rule:

#1: 7*x
---- = 315
10

1->

Excited but still pragmatic enough to expect continued failure, I tried once more before admitting that I have no idea how to operate anything Unixy that's not wrapped in OS X. I typed "x=" and nearly jumped when Mathomatic solved both of my questions in less than 20 seconds! It said:

#1: x = 450

Easiest algebra problem I ever solved (that is algebra, right?)! It gave me the total number of seats in the Duma (450) from which I could easily compute United Russia's new percentage (52.9%)! At first, I claimed the credit I because I figured out how to frame and input the problem, therefore I bent the machine to my will. Of course, now I understand that Mathomatic was programmed by geniuses for operation by idiots, so it can discern the intent in even my nonsensical blathrings. Now I can't wait for the next problem to come along (but not before next summer, please).