Math(s)

[Homer]

17 minutes ago, capytton said:

Or you can learning computer languages, it's kind of killing two birds with one stone 🙂

The thing I like about languages is that I can actually use them in everyday life. I can go to some foreign place and communicate with other people. This usefulness in everyday life is something that (higher) maths simply does not possess for me. I have stood in front of signs in foreign languages, thinking damn, I wish I coud read that. Never in my life have I stood in front of a weirdly shaped field and said to me damn, I wish I could calculate the surface measure of this weird thing.

[CrocodileTears]

14 minutes ago, Homer said:

The thing I like about languages is that I can actually use them in everyday life. I can go to some foreign place and communicate with other people. This usefulness in everyday life is something that (higher) maths simply does not possess for me. I have stood in front of signs in foreign languages, thinking damn, I wish I coud read that. Never in my life have I stood in front of a weirdly shaped field and said to me damn, I wish I could calculate the surface measure of this weird thing.

I would prefer to solve at least one millennium problem, instead of understanding Chinese warning signs. Math just doesn't give you small rewards every day, instead, it offers one big reward, that might be enough for your entire life.

 

Problem with history, languages, art... It can't change your life, math can, and does it every day.

[Homer]

28 minutes ago, capytton said:

Math just doesn't give you small rewards every day, instead, it offers one big reward, that might be enough for your entire life.

Sure, if that's what you're interested in, go for it. I have never had to use anything related to maths that people tried to teach me after 6th grade (and I'm in my late 30s now). The rest was a giant waste of time that I could have spent learning something useful instead. So I'm going to stick with the signs

 

Also, of course language is capable of changing people's lives. Think of people who move abroad to land their dream job. Or people who write successful books and become stinking rich.

[CrocodileTears]

3 minutes ago, Homer said:

Sure, if that's what you're interested in, go for it. I have never had to use anything related to maths that people tried to teach me after 6th grade (and I'm in my late 30s now). The rest was a giant waste of time that I could have spent learning something useful instead. So I'm going to stick with the signs

Yea, I've heard that a lot, but still wanna study math.

I had a situations in my life when people were discussing math problems, and I did not even understand what they were talking about.

[Homer]

2 minutes ago, capytton said:

I had a situations in my life when people were discussing math problems, and I did not even understand what they were talking about.

Now how often does that happen compared to people speaking in a foreign language and you have no clue what they're talking about?

[CrocodileTears]

1 minute ago, Homer said:

Now how often does that happen compared to people speaking in a foreign language and you have no clue what they're talking about?

Yea, but I can ask them to translate it to me. Or just do it by myself. With math, you can't do that

[PorcupineOfDoom]

I don't know that I ever enjoyed maths, but I was always quite good at it. Certain things like differential equations, Laplace transforms, and partial fractions I never minded, but the more complex things get, the more pointless it seems to do some things by hand when a computer can solve it in seconds. Part of a robotics course in uni involved multiplying 4x4 matrices by hand, with 5 unknown variables and sine and cosine terms all over the place (to the point that you had to simplify them to S and C to fit them all on the page). In the final exam it literally took an hour to work through it all. I get the importance of understanding the methodology behind it, but when you're explicitly told that you won't need to do it by hand in industry, grading students on their ability to solve equations that way seems daft.

 

For some context, have a past paper question to enjoy (apologies for my awful handwriting ):

Spoiler

 

[Blue eyes white dragon]

I despise it. I love science (especially chemistry) and can do the basics math but after a certain point just no. It doesnt help that I read numbers wrong.

[Zagadka]

6 hours ago, weird elf said:

Math and I have never been, nor will we ever be, friends.

People keep asking "how can you be bad at maths, you're into music and all?" and I can't help thinking "who knows how much worse I'd have been at math had I not been into music and all" ... transfer effects are a thing.

One of the several things that keeps me from music is not being able to process the math and timing bits.

 

4 hours ago, foxtails said:

I've always enjoyed mathematical puzzles, logic puzzles and stuff like that which probably influenced my enjoyment of maths, but I also just really like that there is an answer and various solutions.

I really hate logic puzzles... my brain just doesn't work that way.

 

But I get the euphoria from solving a complicated equation/problem. I get that from programming and database work. When you spend hours working on code and execute it perfectly finally, it feels amazing.

[nazokashii]

6 hours ago, Gifted With Singleness said:

Well, I must say I'm quite far from the norm here, since I'm actually a math PhD student. I've loved math as long as I can remember, and I basically see math as a big puzzle to solve. There's a certain sense of euphoria I feel upon figuring out the answer to a tricky math problem.

 

I will say, though, that the way math is often taught in school is very disappointing. It's usually taught in a very rigid, overly mechanical way that can make the students feel like robots. It just sucks the life out of it.

 

As an analogy, suppose every art class you take in school just teaches you how to paint a fence, in a very specific, overly prescriptive way. You'd probably feel like you hate art, but that's only because you've never been exposed to true art. (And yes, I do consider math an art.)

 

I can tell you from experience that graduate level mathematics is not even remotely the same thing as the kind of math you learn in K-12 education. It's much more proof-based and conceptual in nature, and I find that a lot more interesting than mindless number crunching.

 

To give you a little taste of the sort of thing I'm talking about, think about the symmetries of a square. That is, what can you do to a square without changing what it looks like?

 

Well, you can do nothing. (Yes, that counts.) You can rotate it any multiple of 90 degrees. You can also flip it, whether by a vertical axis, a horizontal axis, or one of the two diagonal axes. This gives us 8 symmetries, and it turns out this is all of them. If, for example, you rotate the square 180 degrees and then flip it along a vertical axis, that's the same as flipping it along a horizontal axis. This set of transformations is what's called a group, and composing transformations is a lot like multiplication. There's an identity (the do nothing transformation), every transformation has an inverse (just undo it), and the associative property holds (doing transformation A and B, then C, is the same as doing A, then B and C).

 

Now suppose that, instead of a square, you have a square table (so flipping is no longer an option). Now you're just left with the four rotations. This is a group with 4 elements, and it's a subgroup of the previous group (which had 8). By the way, did you notice that 4 is a factor of 8? It turns out that's not a coincidence. That's a property subgroups always have, and you'll learn the proof of that if you take an abstract algebra course covering group theory.

Just yes. Very much yes, to everything. It makes me sad to see how strong people's feelings are around math, and I feel it really is the fault of the educational system there would probably still be some people who just didn't like it for whatever reason even if it was taught perfectly, people just have different likes and dislikes... but I am quite certain it wouldn't be this prevalent nor this vehement...

 

5 hours ago, Calligraphette_Coe said:

Isn't that the truth! I was out of school for decades before I heard about Euler's Identity and the mathematical beauty contained in that one equation. I remember having an almost religious experience the first time I saw it.

I know right! There are so many wonderfully beautiful things in math, and Euler's Identity sure is up there

 

4 hours ago, foxtails said:

Apparently this is an unpopular opinion in this thread, but I really enjoyed maths. 

 

In school I took all humanities courses (history, religion, English etc.) other than for doing advanced maths.

 

I've always enjoyed mathematical puzzles, logic puzzles and stuff like that which probably influenced my enjoyment of maths, but I also just really like that there is an answer and various solutions. It feels satisfying and somewhat motivating to me when I do a maths problem to know that it is solvable, unlike an essay question where there isn't a right answer.

 

Just my two cents as a maths-lover ✌️

Thank you for sharing makes me happy ☺️

 

4 hours ago, trifasciata said:

All my family is involved in teaching higher ed so I talk about this a lot, and as such, I have very strong opinions here.

 

Math is extremely fun when it is taught well. If you are taught to do algebra as just substituting in formulas from who knows where, it sucks. But if you are taught to derive equations, and actually understand theories, then math is great. This is why stats is not my favorite. When taught, the teacher often just gives the students the equations without showing them where they came from, or how to derive them. This is why students often struggle in calculus and pre calc, as they don't have a fundamental understanding of trig, geometry, and algebra. Even though they got all As, they did so by memorizing equations rather than learning how to manipulate equations.

 

Example:

If you are taught sin(arcsin0.5) just cancels out to get 0.5, that is bad teaching, but if you are taught why they cancel out, and proper transformation notation, then it is a blast.

Incredibly true. Thank you 💜

I am completely "incapable" of rote learning/memorizing stuff by heart, I just can't bring myself to do it since it bores me out of my mind, but if I know how to derive things, not only is it far more satisfying, but also makes me capable of "memorizing" so much more, since I only need to know the general gist of it, and then I can derive it myself when I need it.

 

2 hours ago, Gloomy said:

I like math and am good at it, I’m just not always good at remembering formulas. The highest “math” course I took was Calculus in my first semester of college, which I actually often thought was easy while the teacher was explaining it and while we were doing practice problems, but when it came to taking the test where we had to actually remember stuff, I often sucked at that. Since I majored in Finance in college a lot of my courses also had math integrated in them and whether I did well usually depended on whether the professor allowed us to have a cheat sheet (which we do use in the “real world”, I have a binder full of SOP’s for my job) or they expected us to have a perfect memory.

And I completely agree - I find it very pointless when you're not allowed a "cheat" sheet, like what is the purpose of knowing the formulas by heart? Like okay maybe if they want to make sure you know how to derive things and that's what the test is about, that you're supposed to give them the way to get to the formulas, but in every other case I don't see the point of having to memorize stuff like that...

 

One thing that's always been "funny" about me compared to a lot of people and I've seen it in this thread too, like people say math ruined their enjoyment of physics etc, for me it's the complete opposite, physics almost ruins my enjoyment of math xD okay, there's some physics that I love, like the really hyper-abstract stuff, but when it comes to boring calculations that you have to do over and over, and that they even put into math textbooks as example problems, I'm just like noooo xD I really dislike doing calculations - the "mindless number crunching" @Gifted With Singleness was talking about - what I love with a passion is the abstract things, the beautiful concepts, prime numbers and number theory in general is one of my all-time favourite things; and also just the supreme sense of satisfaction from solving a really hard problem you have been struggling with for a long time, that just pure bliss... I went to a special math-focused program in "high school", which had natural sciences as a base, but to be honest if I could've chosen I wouldn't combined the extra-high-level math with social sciences instead, especially languages, I love languages, and music, and to me all of those (math, music, languages) are just variations on the same theme, like, to me, math is just another language... and art is in there too, absolutely, to me all of them are forms of art. I guess it's no coincidence that one of my favourite books is "Gödel, Escher, Bach", since it so beautifully brings together all of those elements into one book ^^

 

Growing up I always loved math, and was set straight on a path to become a mathematician and university researcher... I was super lucky with the teachers I had, and also that I found interesting books to read on the side, like those by Ian Stewart, and they inspired me so much... but then things happened and I became a bit disillusioned, I was so set on only working on very abstract things, I forgot who it was at the moment but there's a famous mathematician who was adamant that his work would never be useful to the world at large (but then now I think it was that it's used a lot in cryptology so that certainly "backfired"), and I kinda wanted to strive for that too, at that time I didn't exactly have the highest thoughts on the world at large... but then things happened and I realized that there was beauty to the world and things I wanted to do for it, but at the time I pretty much only saw the applications of math in physics... I then tried other paths, like starting medical school a few years back and it felt quite good, but just last year I realized that hey actually, I can use maths for medical science... so I'm super excited to actually after this semester, so starting this fall, finally getting back to pursuing math ^^ so like first getting a bachelor in that, then I'll see if I want to continue on with a masters in "pure" math or in something more medically applied already at that point... I feel so silly for not realizing that I could do this earlier, because I've always said that maths is needed everywhere in the world no matter the field or setting, a mathematician is essentially an expert problem-solver, and well, we sure need some problems solved in the world... but I'm hopeful, much more hopeful than I was before for sure...

 

Haha, well, is it obvious that I love math or what xD? The more I talk about math, the more I realize just how right the path feels for me, for sure for sure ^^ and if anyone has read this far, well, thank you for listening to my TED talk

 

Sending much compassion to all the people who have been traumatized by bad teaching of math though all the same 💜 (and if you think you still wouldn't like math no matter how it was taught, well, I hear that too, and it's perfectly fine 😌 (though you of course don't need me to tell you that))

[TormentDubz]

Always been pretty good at it. I loved my calc teacher in high school, she was sweet

[Zagadka]

1 minute ago, TormentDubz said:

Always been pretty good at it. I loved my calc teacher in high school, she was sweet

I had a great geo/trig teacher in high school, also the head of the chess club, he'd open his room during lunch and all the nerds would eat there playing chess and MtG, and doing extracurricular math puzzles and stuff. That was the only time I really enjoyed math.

[quadfasciata]

12 minutes ago, nazokashii said:

Just yes. Very much yes, to everything. It makes me sad to see how strong people's feelings are around math, and I feel it really is the fault of the educational system there would probably still be some people who just didn't like it for whatever reason even if it was taught perfectly, people just have different likes and dislikes... but I am quite certain it wouldn't be this prevalent nor this vehement...

 

I know right! There are so many wonderfully beautiful things in math, and Euler's Identity sure is up there

 

Thank you for sharing makes me happy ☺️

 

Incredibly true. Thank you 💜

I am completely "incapable" of rote learning/memorizing stuff by heart, I just can't bring myself to do it since it bores me out of my mind, but if I know how to derive things, not only is it far more satisfying, but also makes me capable of "memorizing" so much more, since I only need to know the general gist of it, and then I can derive it myself when I need it.

 

And I completely agree - I find it very pointless when you're not allowed a "cheat" sheet, like what is the purpose of knowing the formulas by heart? Like okay maybe if they want to make sure you know how to derive things and that's what the test is about, that you're supposed to give them the way to get to the formulas, but in every other case I don't see the point of having to memorize stuff like that...

 

One thing that's always been "funny" about me compared to a lot of people and I've seen it in this thread too, like people say math ruined their enjoyment of physics etc, for me it's the complete opposite, physics almost ruins my enjoyment of math xD okay, there's some physics that I love, like the really hyper-abstract stuff, but when it comes to boring calculations that you have to do over and over, and that they even put into math textbooks as example problems, I'm just like noooo xD I really dislike doing calculations - the "mindless number crunching" @Gifted With Singleness was talking about - what I love with a passion is the abstract things, the beautiful concepts, prime numbers and number theory in general is one of my all-time favourite things; and also just the supreme sense of satisfaction from solving a really hard problem you have been struggling with for a long time, that just pure bliss... I went to a special math-focused program in "high school", which had natural sciences as a base, but to be honest if I could've chosen I wouldn't combined the extra-high-level math with social sciences instead, especially languages, I love languages, and music, and to me all of those (math, music, languages) are just variations on the same theme, like, to me, math is just another language... and art is in there too, absolutely, to me all of them are forms of art. I guess it's no coincidence that one of my favourite books is "Gödel, Escher, Bach", since it so beautifully brings together all of those elements into one book ^^

 

Growing up I always loved math, and was set straight on a path to become a mathematician and university researcher... I was super lucky with the teachers I had, and also that I found interesting books to read on the side, like those by Ian Stewart, and they inspired me so much... but then things happened and I became a bit disillusioned, I was so set on only working on very abstract things, I forgot who it was at the moment but there's a famous mathematician who was adamant that his work would never be useful to the world at large (but then now I think it was that it's used a lot in cryptology so that certainly "backfired"), and I kinda wanted to strive for that too, at that time I didn't exactly have the highest thoughts on the world at large... but then things happened and I realized that there was beauty to the world and things I wanted to do for it, but at the time I pretty much only saw the applications of math in physics... I then tried other paths, like starting medical school a few years back and it felt quite good, but just last year I realized that hey actually, I can use maths for medical science... so I'm super excited to actually after this semester, so starting this fall, finally getting back to pursuing math ^^ so like first getting a bachelor in that, then I'll see if I want to continue on with a masters in "pure" math or in something more medically applied already at that point... I feel so silly for not realizing that I could do this earlier, because I've always said that maths is needed everywhere in the world no matter the field or setting, a mathematician is essentially an expert problem-solver, and well, we sure need some problems solved in the world... but I'm hopeful, much more hopeful than I was before for sure...

 

Haha, well, is it obvious that I love math or what xD? The more I talk about math, the more I realize just how right the path feels for me, for sure for sure ^^ and if anyone has read this far, well, thank you for listening to my TED talk

 

Sending much compassion to all the people who have been traumatized by bad teaching of math though all the same 💜 (and if you think you still wouldn't like math no matter how it was taught, well, I hear that too, and it's perfectly fine 😌 (though you of course don't need me to tell you that))

Thank you! That was a fantastic way of putting it! agree wholeheartedly with what you said!

[Still]

I was pretty at math in school, but was pretty terrible at calculus when I started it. Didn't help that my math teachers in high school mostly sucked. Eventually I was able to teach myself basic calculus, but the reason I never became a programmer was probably the required high level math.

 

I was always much better at languages, just too bad that doesn't really pay in this world (I should know since I have a related master's degree...).

[Topi]

Since I was little that I really enjoyed math. I actually had this computer game CD called "I love math" and would play it all the time. I was fairly good at it too, better at some parts than others, until I reached 11th and 12th grade in high school. I had a really bad teacher and totally lost all the pleasure and fun I had while doing maths, because I simply didn't understand what was going on at all. I still worked my ass off to try and understand the concepts on my own, but trigonometry and probabilities never made sense in my head. Physics were the worst, because we were just given some formulas and equations and was like "oh now have fun solving this problems" and usually they had trig in them so...  

 

Due to how bad I failed high school's math, when I got to uni, I choose a degree that had minimal math and physics, because I was afraid of never passing these subjects, but it turned out that I was actually pretty good at the math taught. I actually enjoyed these classes a lot! All the demonstrations, we had to do and all that were actually quite great and fun to learn! One of the classes I enjoyed the most was when we were learning to solve the Schrödinger equation applied to spectroscopies. It was a full semester of a teacher solving the equation of the board, explaining each step in detail. I actually looked for it into more detail, while studying for tests. 

 

To be honest, I haven't done math in so long and I kind of miss it, but I have no time to actually go look the basics of differential equations or derivatives and such, so I stick to sudokus and such games for now.     

[GingerRose]

13 hours ago, Zagadka said:

how do y'all feel about mathematics?

I teach primary school maths so...that's the extent of my comfort zone there. Even then schools are constantly changing how it's taught so I keep learning new methods... 😕  

[Sarah-Sylvia]

I like math

Actually, I'd say it was my favorite subject in school.

Tbh, strictly speaking, literature and music would be my favorite subjects, but school just didn't manage to pull that out for me. Not the most fun way to learn, especially music. I didn't hate english, it was one of my best subject, but my native language is french, and those classes suuucked. French is so complex and so many rules and verb forms feel unnecessary. It was my worst subject by quite a biit.

Math is just.. fun to try to solve things. I liked algebra too, there's something cool about being able to solve things by throwing letters around lol.

[MetricalSky]

Yeah, I like math. It was my favourite subject in high school, probably because it was the subject I did the best in. In university it was a bit more of a mixed bag; I did okay but not great at calculus and linear algebra, but I did better on discrete maths, logic, Boolean algebra, set theory, that kinda stuff. Which is fine for me as a software developer, especially since my day-to-day work doesn't involve digital signal processing or anything similar that would really require calculus or matrices.

[soychiara]

I have a love-hate relationship with math, I find it really interesting, but also extremely hard and confusing. I'm in my second year of university to become an astronomer, It takes me twice the time and energy as my friends to understand (and pass) the classes but I'll get there eventually. I really like physics though, and I'd love to get more into chemistry. 

 

Also I gotta say that I really like algebra but FUCK calculus.

[Unleash the Echidnas]

12 hours ago, Gifted With Singleness said:

Well, I must say I'm quite far from the norm here, since I'm actually a math PhD student.

PhD student in applied math. 🙃 Never been particularly interested in or enjoyed math for math's sake and was pretty bored with it until it became a useful tool. For me that was first by way of differential equations and linear algebra though I later worked jobs where secondary school geometry and physics was super useful. I struggle with the more formal parts of graduate maths and especially understanding or writing proofs takes me forever so math proper is hard work rather than fun. But being able take some of the things mathematicians and statisticians come up with and apply them to problems is enjoyable.

 

 

7 hours ago, Homer said:

Now how often does that happen compared to people speaking in a foreign language and you have no clue what they're talking about?

Quite commonly for me, actually. One thing about living in North America is there's less language diversity than in Europe and, especially with the virus, it's not like I'm in places where there's likely to be anyone speaking a different language. But a lot of what I do to earn a living is looking through math stuff to see what might be most useful. And pretty much every paper and book chapter uses a different notation for a different problem...

 

 

7 hours ago, PorcupineOfDoom said:

I get the importance of understanding the methodology behind it, but when you're explicitly told that you won't need to do it by hand in industry, grading students on their ability to solve equations that way seems daft.

It is daft because it's an inefficient use of exam time. If it was a take home exam and you could write the code for the quaternions (I'm guessing) that would be different.

 

 

18 minutes ago, soychiara said:

Also I gotta say that I really like algebra but FUCK calculus.

No worries. Once you get partway into to differential equations, calculus turns into algebra and you can solve second order differentials in your head. Linear algebra is also a good candidate for the most useful course I've ever taken, especially when it comes to manipulating data and that sort of programming.

[ben8884]

I suck at Math, I failed high school math multiple times and didn't actually pass it until I did an equivalency in my 20s.

[foxtails]

16 hours ago, weird elf said:

People keep asking "how can you be bad at maths, you're into music and all?" and I can't help thinking "who knows how much worse I'd have been at math had I not been into music and all" ... transfer effects are a thing.

This is so interesting to me! Transfer effects are really cool - I did music for many years and definitely feel like that was really useful for my understanding of not only maths but also learning foreign languages 

[daveb]

I really liked some math classes I took, and others not so much. I certainly did better at some. Couldn't seem to make any sense out of trig. One class I really enjoyed covered a variety of math concepts/areas, such as number systems, things like combinatorial math, probability, and various other things. But I don't use much of it since I studied 2 or more decades ago, so I don't remember much.

[soychiara]

8 hours ago, Unleash the Echidnas said:

No worries. Once you get partway into to differential equations, calculus turns into algebra and you can solve second order differentials in your head. Linear algebra is also a good candidate for the most useful course I've ever taken, especially when it comes to manipulating data and that sort of programming.

Yes!! I'm taking 4 classes right now: linear algebra, calculus 2, programming, and general physics 2. I love linear algebra, and differential equations are a mess but I'll get there eventually. In programming we're seeing FORTRAN 77/95 and later we'll learn Python, and physics is a ball of different subjects (gravitation law, elasticity, fluid mechanics, waves, and thermodynamics) 

(english isn't my first language so idk if I said the right translations hehe, I hope it can be understood)

[Emery.]

On 5/9/2021 at 5:03 PM, capytton said:

I would prefer to solve at least one millennium problem, instead of understanding Chinese warning signs. 

Why pick just one? Tbh, Chinese isn't that hard. Especially the warning signs. But the hard part about Chinese for many people is that it's a tonal language. 

 

@nazokashii I also memorize things better when I know where they come from, and I'm not particularly good at memorizing. The great thing about math is that it makes sense. Unlike a ton of history dates...

 

[CrocodileTears]

😶

[Emery.]

I found math easy but boring. Calculus is when it started to interest me, because it had a non-borning application in physics. Found... past tense. I still use math a lot at what I do, I code and do some machine learning. Usually, there isn't a lot of math in programming, although it requires a similar kind of thinking.

 

On 5/9/2021 at 12:34 PM, Gifted With Singleness said:

Well, I must say I'm quite far from the norm here, since I'm actually a math PhD student. I've loved math as long as I can remember, and I basically see math as a big puzzle to solve. There's a certain sense of euphoria I feel upon figuring out the answer to a tricky math problem.

 

I will say, though, that the way math is often taught in school is very disappointing. It's usually taught in a very rigid, overly mechanical way that can make the students feel like robots. It just sucks the life out of it.

 

As an analogy, suppose every art class you take in school just teaches you how to paint a fence, in a very specific, overly prescriptive way. You'd probably feel like you hate art, but that's only because you've never been exposed to true art. (And yes, I do consider math an art.)

 

I can tell you from experience that graduate level mathematics is not even remotely the same thing as the kind of math you learn in K-12 education. It's much more proof-based and conceptual in nature, and I find that a lot more interesting than mindless number crunching.

 

To give you a little taste of the sort of thing I'm talking about, think about the symmetries of a square. That is, what can you do to a square without changing what it looks like?

 

Well, you can do nothing. (Yes, that counts.) You can rotate it any multiple of 90 degrees. You can also flip it, whether by a vertical axis, a horizontal axis, or one of the two diagonal axes. This gives us 8 symmetries, and it turns out this is all of them. If, for example, you rotate the square 180 degrees and then flip it along a vertical axis, that's the same as flipping it along a horizontal axis. This set of transformations is what's called a group, and composing transformations is a lot like multiplication. There's an identity (the do nothing transformation), every transformation has an inverse (just undo it), and the associative property holds (doing transformation A and B, then C, is the same as doing A, then B and C).

 

Now suppose that, instead of a square, you have a square table (so flipping is no longer an option). Now you're just left with the four rotations. This is a group with 4 elements, and it's a subgroup of the previous group (which had 8). By the way, did you notice that 4 is a factor of 8? It turns out that's not a coincidence. That's a property subgroups always have, and you'll learn the proof of that if you take an abstract algebra course covering group theory.

I agree 100%. I also do postgrad math stuff and it's far less dull than math in high school. 

 

I also think math is a language to portray certain things. You can make it show whatever you want. 

 

On 5/9/2021 at 1:59 PM, A User said:

Like how do you do part C??????????????

Why is it hard tho? Um, whatever, if you run across a problem like that, I can explain it to you easily. 

 

On 5/9/2021 at 4:19 PM, Homer said:

learning languages > learning maths

Nada. Both are fun. 

[quadfasciata]

2 hours ago, Emery. said:

it's far less dull than math in high school. 

Why did you find highschool math dull?

[Emery.]

3 minutes ago, trifasciata said:

Why did you find highschool math dull?

As others pointed out previously: it's like taking a very rigid fence painting class as an art class. Or caligraphy instead of making sense of the writing. Maybe it was just a too easy class in my case. I was known for multiplying those stupid matrices in my head. The two last years of high school was when it got interesting for me, in the advanced math class, which had some university material already. I could apply it in the advanced physics class, also univeristy level - kinematics (with calculus), oscillations, quantum mechanichs, alternating currents. This is where it gets you to some really not obvious and interesting stuff. 

[Tetus]

On 5/9/2021 at 10:33 PM, daveb said:

I really liked some math classes I took, and others not so much. I certainly did better at some. Couldn't seem to make any sense out of trig. One class I really enjoyed covered a variety of math concepts/areas, such as number systems, things like combinatorial math, probability, and various other things. But I don't use much of it since I studied 2 or more decades ago, so I don't remember much.

I used to think I liked math, then I took calc 2 and working with series was beyond boring, so I dropped it and entered the far more sensible and lucrative field of philosophy, which is why I'm now a highly paid professional philosopher who totally uses my education to great effect every day.

 

But the reason I quoted you was trig. I feel like a lot of people know the mnemonic 'SOHCAHTOA', but I had a much better one instilled in me at a young age by a pretty odd teacher I had in 7th grade: "Some Old Hippie/Caught Another Hippie/Tripping On Acid". I remember thinking it was hilarious at the time, and then when I took trig again in high school, I was confused why everyone didn't just use the drug related mnemonic.