What specifically do you not like about it. And I don’t just mean “it’s too hard”, what specifically is hard?
I feel like most people would like mathematics, but the education system failed them, teaching in a way that’s not enjoyable.
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it’s not that I don’t like it, I just don’t like it as much as I used to.
I wanted to be a math teacher once upon a time. then, one year the teacher I really looked up to held the entire class back for over two months because 3-5 students couldn’t grasp sin cos & tan. it should have taken us three weeks but instead took us almost three times as long.
by the end of it, the students that still didn’t grasp it still didn’t grasp it and the students that did grasp it no longer grasped it.
I was burnt out on it and honestly threw myself into tech just to get the fuck away from math.
worked out in my favor. teachers get paid three to four times less than I do currently, so it was a win.
I still couldn’t give a fuck about sin cos & tan.
Because the mathematics literature fucking sucks.
It is written by math nerds for math nerds. Show me all the fucking proof, you just spent 10 pages talking about anything and everything but you can’t expand on how your formula has been transformed because of whatever theorem.
How many god damn time have I read something akin to “the proof is left to the reader. The resulting formula is [something entirely new].”
Like fuck you, show me how it’s done.
Because my brain had/has enough room to hold diagraming sentences or higher mathematics. And I chose the one that allows for me to insult people in a way where they know I’m insulting them, but are unable to articulate how I’m insulting them.
I like algebra, it’s logical and understandable for me. But calculus just falls out of my head the minute I take my eyes off of it.
I am an accountant, I love numbers and number trivia, little puzzles.
But math math, like beyond algebra? Not as much.
And early math, like arithmetic, was poisoned by bad teachers and bad teaching methods. I didn’t like it before algebra, it was boring.
I never sucked but I’m bad at abstract thought (if you can call it that), so I never enjoyed math. I’m much more of a visual/ auditory learner. Things like geometry were easy, but once I got to calculus I said “fuck this”.
Because I only have a limited amount of dopamine to spend each day, and I rather not waste it on something as boring as math. ADHD does not allow me to pursue things that don’t interest me unless I’m forced to.
Neurotypical people with plenty of dopamine to spare may struggle to understand the concept of their brain physically stopping their body from doing anything that doesn’t feel satisfying, nor rewarding to do.
This comes off like a person who has no empathy, or who assumes everyone else thinks like they do. When I was in college, I tutored math to middle school kids, and I can say with certainty that some people’s brains take to it more naturally than others. You can be very smart and still struggle with math.
And putting that aside, “enjoyment” is inherently subjective. It’s like saying most people would enjoy liver and onions if they had it cooked right. No, some people will and some people won’t. It’s okay - people are a diverse lot and it’s fine if some people don’t like what you like.
You can be very smart and struggle with anything.
Absolutely
I’m bad at it and I get numbers mixed up pretty easily.
Example: I went to a pro sports game over the weekend. I sat 4 of us in the wrong row because I read the row number wrong. I saw row 12 but read row 15. I tend to mix up numbers like that often and then I get the answers to math problems wrong. This is highly frustrating to me and it makes me not like math very much.
Sounds like you might be dyslexic.
I enjoy the concepts and structures of mathematics. Fractal geometry, holomorphic dynamics, computational theory, uncertainty principles and all that are fascinating as hell. Discrete systems dancing with continuous integrals at process limits.
I DO NOT ENJOY working with math. Specifically I cant read complex equations. I don’t have an attention disorder but I swear the moment I try reading anything that looks like this I get overloaded and nope out. If it aint highschool algebra with PEMDAS I cant do it. If you put a bullet to my head and pinned my survival on properly solving a quadratic equation I’d just tell you to shoot me.
The concepts are cool once you can get past the notation to understand the ontology of whats trying to be conveyed. The actual expanded out notations and trying to do work with them is a fuckin nightmare.
Also since im ranting can I just say, across STEM the biggest problem is the naming convention. Math and science would be at least 60% more accessable if we went back and renamed all theorems, hypothesis, proofs, to be what they are about instead of just shouting out the guy who discovered it. “eulers identity” doesnt mean a fucking thing. Neither does scrodingers equations or the riemann hypothesis or turing machines. THESE ARE NOT ACCESSABLE NAMES THEY CONVEY NOTHING INTRINSICALLY BESIDES SOME DEAD GUYS LAST NAME. GET SOME PROGRAMMERS WHO KNOW HOW TO ACTUALLY DECLARE HUMAN READABLE STRINGS FOR YOUR FUCKING ABSTRACTION OBJECTS.
I don’t trust math. Something doesn’t add up here.
I’m good at math, but I dislike it for the same reason I dislike cutting the grass: it’s work and my ADHD brain doesn’t get reward dopamine for accomplishing work.
This. I used to bloody love maths. It used to be like a puzzle that felt good when it all fit together neatly. Nowadays its just work. When I see a bunch of numbers that need worked my body physically aches with frustration.
I still love when numbers do stuff, but I need them spooned to me like a semi-literate milk-fed gimp.
I somehow feel that you’re getting a small sample size here
It doesn’t make logical sense. Why does the 3-4-5 triangle work out cleanly, and yet π and e are irrational? How can 0.999… and 1 be exactly the same number? Who cares about solving lost and unprovable theorems — how do these help anyone?
Who cares about solving lost and unprovable theorems — how do these help anyone?
I moved this one first because it’s the most important to answer. A lot of esoteric math does end up leading to useful results in science, engineering, or computer science. A lot of breakthroughs in physics, especially historically, came from breakthroughs in math. A lot of computer science, such as error correction and encryption, came from what was previously esoteric mathematics.
Why does the 3-4-5 triangle work out cleanly, and yet π and e are irrational?
There kinda isn’t a satisfying answer to this; it just turns out that’s how the world works. Some important questions have nice integer answers, and some don’t.
How can 0.999… and 1 be exactly the same number?
0.999… == 1 because there is no number in between 1 and 0.999… therefore they must be the same number.
For any two numbers that aren’t equal, you can find numbers between them (specifically do something like a*0.5 + b*0.5). You can’t define 0.999… as something like “the largest number less than 1” because there is no such number, because if you found such a number, you could find another number between it and 1.
However, there are some situations where the idea of “0.999…” might have some meaning, if you interpret it as “taking the limit of something as it approaches 1 from below”. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-sided_limit for some examples. These examples are mostly centered around 0, but if you moved it to be centered around 1, you would get a function where f(0.999…) ≠ f(1.000…1) with f(1) not having a well defined value.
But because 0.999… is not the commonly accepted notation for that limit, some people reading your work would be confused. In the end it’s a matter of language: agreeing on a meaning for symbols so you can communicate your ideas clearly.
To add to this excellent answer, in my mind at least some of the confusion comes from trying to compare a number to a concept.
Using the 0.999… example, that doesn’t have a set numeric value as such. You cant use it in an algebraic formula to calculate a fixed result. Logically, it’s a number just below 1.0, but mathematically, every time you try to make that distinction it effectively shifts the goal posts.
It’s like the old “count to infinity” bit, it’s not impossible because it’s a big number, it’s impossible because it’s not a number at all, it’s a concept.
Who cares about solving lost and unprovable theorems — how do these help anyone?
They do have a way of eventually coming up in something practical. It might take a long time though, that’s fair.
spoiler since I want to be sensitive to you not liking math, but I have comments
How can 0.999… and 1 be exactly the same number?
I mean, you can define things a different way, but it gets messy fast. The basic idea is that there shouldn’t be any gaps between the numbers - so a line is as unbroken as it looks. Without making all kinds of other adjustments 0.999… would break that, since there’s no way to add further decimals in between it and 1.
As for the constants, yeah, it’s weird. A lot of math is weird; the universe wasn’t built for us.
I’m good at math but I’m slow at it. I would need my own time to solve a problem. But school always needed it done in a very short amount of time.
Someone who used to dislike it in school and university here.
Having to cram a lot of information and formulas, and then reproduce it without error for an exam. None of it made sense, and I wasn’t even aware it was possible for it to make sense.
Only after many years did I understand it’s all connected, there’s a logic to it. It’s possible to understand rather than just blindly learn.
Btw the notation really doesn’t help.
I think this is true for lots of people. I also think there’s a bunch of us that have never had that feeling of it being a memorisation task.
In fact, the reason I liked maths and science was because it wasn’t memorisation. Unlike languages (for example) you could always work out the bit you forgot, and didn’t need to depend on some made-up aide-memoire that only applied 75% of the time and remember what 25% it didn’t apply to.
All I can think is that some early teacher failed you, and didn’t lay out how the foundations worked.
if the foundations of mathematics are dependent on a single early teacher… that’s a serious dependency for mathematics then.
This is true in all cases. The proof is left as an exercise for the student.
