How can anyone be interested in mathematics?

Freedom Of Speech · #1 by **Freedom Of Speech** » Sep 04, 2011 5:11 pm

I hated mathematics at school with a passion. I struggled with algebra and equations, initially because I just didn't understand them, then after practice when I learned "how to do it", I just simply found it all very pointless and boring. People who are fanatical about maths and who study for degrees in mathematics are so far outside of the boundaries of my comprehension that they might as well be creatures from another planet.

What drives you to take an interest in something which I not only find mind numbing, spirit crushing and soul-destroyingly boring, but also painful and a bit scary?

I just don't understand the attraction in numbers, and how anyone could be interested in the cold, clinical, academic discipline which is mathematics.

Please explain what has gone wrong in your life.

Zwaarddijk · #2 by **Zwaarddijk** » Sep 04, 2011 5:19 pm

I see how numbers (and algebra, and so on) give methods of explaining things that I always have wanted to know how they work - e.g. why chords don't just sound like a bunch of simultaneous tones, but an actual ~sonority~ of its own, and lots of other things. That's why I like maths.

newolder · #3 by **newolder** » Sep 04, 2011 5:23 pm

at least 1 thing "went wrong" hereabouts. sadly it resulted in a 6 day coma so i have no method to xplayn 2 miself what went wrong. neuroscientists can build models to give probable explanations but they couldn't so do wifout mathematics. do u think mathematics is invented by hyper-boreal apes or do we just make discoveries? :ask:

twistor59 · #4 by **twistor59** » Sep 04, 2011 5:30 pm

Freedom Of Speech wrote:

I just don't understand the attraction in numbers, and how anyone could be interested in the cold, clinical, academic discipline which is mathematics.

Because maths gives me a stonking great woody.

orpheus · #5 by **orpheus** » Sep 04, 2011 5:34 pm

Patterns, patterns, patterns.

The problem with math is that you have to go through years of learning to manipulate numbers in order to get to the fun stuff. Like an architect having to learn all about plumbing codes and how to calculate material stresses - years of this - before the fun of designing a building and seeing it come to fruition.

(probably better metaphors to be found, but not by me at the moment.)

The main point being that the preliminary, somewhat tedious stage of learning the rudiments is a long one; math is a technique-intensive art. And many are totally turned off by bad teachers at these early stages.

I was only ok at algebra, geometry, etc. Didn't particularly like them, so I only applied myself as much as I had to. Somehow I got to calculus - and to my amazement, it all started to be exciting and fun. Joyous, even.

Sadly, that was my senior year of high school, and the music conservatories I went to after graduation had no math in their curricula. I've often thought I should re-learn math, just for my own pleasure.

Freedom Of Speech · #6 by **Freedom Of Speech** » Sep 04, 2011 6:14 pm

Good answer orpheus, I kind of understand the fascination with patterns, and getting hooked on the techniques and modes of doing mathematical stuff. But regrettably, I still tend to view mathematicians as anoraks and nerdy-geeky types who are socially awkward and not too popular with the opposite sex, if you catch my drift.

Twistor's comment:

"Because maths gives me a stonking great woody."

...was both hilarious and disturbing. :lol:

cavarka9 · #7 by **cavarka9** » Sep 04, 2011 7:38 pm

I didnt like much about maths either, except simple geometry, then came ellipses and hyperbolas and inverse trignomentric functions and they gave me a head ache. Then came planes and limits and continous fns and I was passable in it.
Then in my undergraduate course, differential equations was easy, calulus - volume integrals, gauss divergence etc was easy. All for the sake of exams if you know what I mean, then out of no where I saw sequences and series, I saw something in math which was beautiful in trying to prove whether a series was convergent or divergent, (I failed the exam but that had to do with my handwriting).
Since then I knew that math is beautiful but the bitch demands obsession and constant foreplay.

MacIver · #8 by **MacIver** » Sep 04, 2011 8:08 pm

Much of it is just a side-effect; I'm interested in science therefore a natural interest in mathematics is logical.

newolder wrote:do u think mathematics is invented by hyper-boreal apes or do we just make discoveries?

newolder hits onto an interesting point here. We don't create maths, we just discover it. Mathematics, or the Code, is the reason we exist. It can be used to explain everything. From the formation of molecules to the fusion of stars.

Freedom Of Speech · #9 by **Freedom Of Speech** » Sep 04, 2011 8:21 pm

cavarka9 wrote:I didnt like much about maths either, except simple geometry, then came ellipses and hyperbolas and inverse trignomentric functions and they gave me a head ache. Then came planes and limits and continous fns and I was passable in it.
Then in my undergraduate course, differential equations was easy, calulus - volume integrals, gauss divergence etc was easy. All for the sake of exams if you know what I mean, then out of no where I saw sequences and series, I saw something in math which was beautiful in trying to prove whether a series was convergent or divergent, (I failed the exam but that had to do with my handwriting).
Since then I knew that math is beautiful but the bitch demands obsession and constant foreplay.

LOL

VazScep · **#10** by **VazScep** » Sep 05, 2011 10:04 am

Freedom Of Speech wrote:I hated mathematics at school with a passion. I struggled with algebra and equations, initially because I just didn't understand them, then after practice when I learned "how to do it", I just simply found it all very pointless and boring. People who are fanatical about maths and who study for degrees in mathematics are so far outside of the boundaries of my comprehension that they might as well be creatures from another planet.

What drives you to take an interest in something which I not only find mind numbing, spirit crushing and soul-destroyingly boring, but also painful and a bit scary?

I always wanted to write computer games with cool graphical effects and physics, and you need to know maths for that. So I started taking undergraduate level maths courses.

Then I discovered pure mathematics, with its incredibly precise definitions, impeccable proofs, and its obsession with making everything as abstract as possible, and I decided that was way more awesome than computer game physics.

I just don't understand the attraction in numbers,

I still don't really care that much for numbers. But once you go beyond high-school, mathematics isn't so much about numbers anymore. It's basically an entirely different subject by that point.

Darkchilde · **#11** by **Darkchilde** » Sep 05, 2011 11:12 am

I have always loved maths. I have always been good with maths.

Differential calculus is my favorite, give me differential equations, i just love them. Most of the physics courses I am doing, depend on differential equations, and some like the Navier Stokes do not have general solutions, only particular solutions.

rainbow · **#12** by **rainbow** » Sep 05, 2011 11:33 am

twistor59 wrote:
Freedom Of Speech wrote:

I just don't understand the attraction in numbers, and how anyone could be interested in the cold, clinical, academic discipline which is mathematics.

Because maths gives me a stonking great woody.

That is fine, but when performing multivariable functions please remember to use the appropriate protective measures.

newolder · **#13** by **newolder** » Sep 05, 2011 11:55 am

Also, FoS could not have posted its rant without the mathematics that underpins the intertubez.

rainbow · **#14** by **rainbow** » Sep 05, 2011 12:53 pm

newolder wrote:Also, FoS could not have posted its rant without the mathematics that underpins the intertubez.

...and I must say that both parties should share similar eigenvalues, or it could result in matrix covariance.

Clive Durdle · **#15** by **Clive Durdle** » Sep 05, 2011 1:53 pm

http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/

WELCOME. The subject of this website is a manuscript of extraordinary importance to the history of science, the Archimedes Palimpsest. This thirteenth century prayer book contains erased texts that were written several centuries earlier still. These erased texts include two treatises by Archimedes that can be found nowhere else, The Method and Stomachion. The manuscript sold at auction to a private collector on the 29th October 1998. The owner deposited the manuscript at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, a few months later. Since that date the manuscript has been the subject of conservation, imaging and scholarship, in order to better read the texts. The Archimedes Palimpsest project, as it is called, has shed new light on Archimedes and revealed new texts from the ancient world. It has also generated a great deal of public curiosity, as well as the interest of scholars throughout the world. I do hope that you find answers to some of the questions you may have concerning the manuscript and the progress of the project on this site.

orpheus · **#16** by **orpheus** » Sep 05, 2011 4:09 pm

From a story in Stanislaw Lem's fantastic book The Cyberiad:

Stanislaw Lem wrote:
Love and Tensor Algebra

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustrum longs to be a cone
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Bools or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
the product o four scalars is defines!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!

(misspellings are the fault of the transcriber for that website. Lem did not make those sorts of mistakes.)

http://people.ee.duke.edu/~wrankin/misc/tensor.html

mraltair · **#17** by **mraltair** » Sep 05, 2011 4:33 pm

Hold on I have a massive passion ( :naughty2:

) for science, I'm also socially awkward and not so good with the ladies, but I'm terrible at maths. :scratch:

BIDMAS is my upper limit. I love physics of different kinds so understanding maths would be of great benefit for me, I just hate not being able to do it which makes me hate maths itself.

Preno · **#18** by **Preno** » Sep 05, 2011 5:51 pm

orpheus wrote:(misspellings are the fault of the transcriber for that website. Lem did not make those sorts of mistakes.)

Uh, that's rather obvious considering that he wrote in Polish.

Freedom of Speech wrote:I just don't understand the attraction in numbers,

Only certain subfields of mathematics are concerned with numbers.

and how anyone could be interested in the cold, clinical, academic discipline which is mathematics.

Mathematics is basically pure creativity, hth.

orpheus · **#19** by **orpheus** » Sep 05, 2011 6:32 pm

Preno wrote:
orpheus wrote:(misspellings are the fault of the transcriber for that website. Lem did not make those sorts of mistakes.)
Uh, that's rather obvious considering that he wrote in Polish.

You're right, of course. I should have said that Michael Kandel, the rather brilliant translator of The Cyberiad (as well as other of Lem's books), did not make those mistakes. But I didn't have my copy of the book handy and had to rely on an online transcription.

Kandel's work is extraordinary, in fact. Hofstadter, in Le Ton Beau de Marot writes extensively about the problems of translation - and especially the translation of poetry. To be sure, Hofstadter is not the only one who has tackled this subject, but he comes to mind because uses Lem's works as examples. (I can't recall whether or not he dealt with this particular poem.)

Sorry; this is all off topic. Except that math arguably is a key component to the deep foundations of the act of translation. And that's pretty exciting.

By the way, I pretty much agree with the rest of your post.

rainbow · **#20** by **rainbow** » Sep 06, 2011 6:25 am

orpheus wrote:
Sorry; this is all off topic. Except that math arguably is a key component to the deep foundations of the act of translation. And that's pretty exciting.

Deedy.
Who amongst us has not been deeply moved by a vector transformation?