Are fractions obsolete?

In a USA Today article titled, Professor: Fractions should be scrapped, Dennis DeTurck argues that, "Fractions have had their day, being useful for by-hand calculation, but in this digital age, they're as obsolete as Roman numerals are."

i couldn't disagree more.

According to DeTurk, after he publicly made his "Down with Fractions" proclamation, "There were blogs and rants, and there were some critical e-mails, they'd always boil down to: 'What would we do in cooking and carpentry?' "

It turns out fractions are pretty important for things like ratios and rates (to name a few). What i think the proposition actually boils down to is something more along the lines of: 'What would we do in science and engineering?' If your idea of math is to put some numbers in and get a number out, then DeTurk may be right...as long as you have a calculator (try doing 9.33*.429 in your head...now try (28/3)*(3/7)). But you can't even do simple algebra without a fairly good understanding of fractions...much less trigonometry or calculus!

DeTurk goes on to attack long division, the calculation of square roots and by-hand multiplication of long numbers. It looks like 90% of what i learned in math after 3rd grade isn't really that important after all.

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