>Have no real love for math in my mind
>It's fun and interesting, but it's not my cup of tea
>Would rather draw pretty pictures
How do I get interested in mathematics?
Does it have to be intrinsic to your psychology? I feel there's a wealth of fun to be had in it. I'd really like to compete against others and feel superior to them. There's probably no greater joy than making someone feel like an idiot.
>I'd really like to compete against others and feel superior to them.
if you're
>undergrad -> putnam exam
>high school -> whatever contests are around
>other age -> millennium prize problems are the ultimate 'competition' (1 million dollars, instant place in mathematical history)
find some mathematical objects you find particularly interesting
mathoverflow.net
I loved maths until calculus, at which point nothing made sense anymore and I gave up on it forever after my second year of trying.
I could have tried harder, I suppose, but after going through 4 professors and at least a dozen TAs who refused to explain the "why" of anything and just looked at me like I was an alien when I'd ask anything in my struggle to understand that shit, I'm also going to go ahead and state for the record that most math-minded people are genetically incapable of being passionate, effective, creative, or charismatic teachers.
My intro to calculus was just day after day of the professor silently walking into the room 10 minutes late staring at his shoes, scribbling equations on the board and then muttering "integrate" or "differentiate" and that was it. Then we'd have a test that was all word problems for some fucking reason, and I'd have to intuit what the fuck to do with all the numbers when I wasn't told what the hell differentiation or integration even does other than make the equations into wacky different-looking equations.
The midterm and final were both, unsurprisingly, graded on a 65 point curve. 35% was an A+. Yay maths.
I've always hated that.
It's so easy to just "understand" the surface of mathematics via simple plug-in formulas.
You never really know it unless you basically invent it with variables in your own mind. That's the primary reason for word problems. They're difficult if you don't know what you're looking for.
The worst part is it all compounds and snow-balls if you never learn the first part.
As someone who went through a rigorous calculus class in the math department and then a full analysis course later on, and with some experience as to how calculus is taught to non-math majors, if any of you fucks were to ask me ANYTHING about how calculus works I would flip the fuck out. I would literally shoot you in the face.
There is just too much knowledge you lack. If you were to ask me about how integrals or derivatives work then you are already going way too far because you wouldn't understand shit.
If you were to ask me how do limits work then this is better but it is still too far for you to understand.
If you were to ask me what are real numbers then again we are better but even this is way beyond your comprehension.
If you were to ask me about why 1+1=2 then maybe, MAYBE if I dumb it down a lot then I could possibly explain it to you.
math can make extremely interesting pictures effortlessly
and it does, more often than you probably think
This is precisely why I feel it's so difficult to teach mathematics to people that have no vested interest in it. There's so much they don't understand. There's an intuitive way to do all of this, but you're effectively an artist that can only show the surface of something with plenty of thought powering it.
Mathematics is a skill like anything else.
It's tragic that most school teachers never show people how to navigate its depths.
I know how they all work. Put an equation in front of me, and I can work it properly if you tell me what you want done with it - or at least I could have at the time.
But I couldn't tell you why the fuck you'd ever want to.
>"Why should I add one apple and another apple into two apples?"
>So you know how many total apples you have.
Easy.
>"Why should I divide the volume of the basket by the volume of the apple?"
>So you know how many apples the basket can hold.
Also easy as fuck. Trig is also super easy to explain, generally replacing apples with apple pi. Calculus, on the other hand...
>"Why should I differentiate this apple?"
>Because.
>"Why should I integrate these apples?"
>B̛̲͔̘͍̘͉͕͎̙e͓̥̱ͅç͟͏̲͇̻͔̝͚a̡͕̥͕̜͘͡ų̳̪͉̺͞ṣ̶̸͉̰̯̬̥̳̣͘e̟̗̭̘͢.̱͍̺̺͕̗̖
OP here
I constantly employ division and perspective in all of my works. I know all about the relation between good math and good art.
If they are asking word problems it's surely relating to physics
they want you to understand what calculus has to do with physics
sounds like you never actually did
>>"Why should I differentiate this apple?"
Because of the properties the derivative has BY CONSTRUCTION, the derivative of a function encondes critical information of that very same function.
>>"Why should I integrate these apples?"
Because the integral, by construction, encodes critical information about the function itself.
It is literally that easy. But you wouldn't understand. Because you see, derivatives and integrals are made up concepts. Their power comes from the way you are constructed and what their construction implies.
Someone who is not familiar with their construction would never get it. And if you wanted to be familiar with their construction then you would have to get familiar with sequences, limits of real functions and limits of sequences. And to get familiar with those things you would have to be familiar with a theory of algebra/arithmetic on numbers. And to be familiar with that you would have to be familiar with the construction of those numbers. And to be familiar with the construction of those numbers you would need a really strong grasp of mathematical logic and the basics of set theory.
In the field of 3d graphics, everything that comes up when you are trying to understand how to draw a realistic picture is studied
Perspective calculations in raster graphics might be interesting
also you can learn how refraction/reflection works from ray tracing, a technique for producing 3d scenes that are extremely accurate rather than fast. snell's law and lambert's cosine law come up, for example
Originally I was talking about fractals, which are very intriguing. This one is my favorite, but there are countless waiting to be studied.
The questions were mostly about yardwork - measuring fences and shit. I did really well in my physics classes, because physics professors actually tell you what the each formula or mathematical technique is used for - a radical idea, it seems.
>encodes critical information
I believe you. What information? What is that information used for? You can tell me how critical it is, but integrating any given equation might as well just give the result "bing tiddle tiddle bong" if you don't know ahead of time what you could apply that information to.
Calculus, in my experience, is math without context, and anything without context is without purpose.
>What information?
Well, for the derivative it is very obvious. The roots of the derivative of a function are the same points that represent a change of slope direction (forgot the rigorous term for this lol.) in the original function.
From this fact there is so much you can know.
An integral is an infinite sum. A really special kind of sum. Traditionally it subdivides the domain of the function and then computes the sum of the length of each parition times the function evaluated at an x inside that part of the function.
For elementary calculus this usually means the area under a curve but from what this infinite sums actually represents you can find how to describe arc length, volume of revolution and other things as long as you know how to turn those things into similar infinite sums and then know ho wto manipulate infinite sums.
But if you go beyond that then you find that from this definition the integral has applications in many domains, not only real numbers and has applications that even go into probability, as by a similar manipulation of infinite sums you can find that integrals serve to compute the average value of a function in a given interval. Pretty cool. But you need to understand series and infinite series.
If that's why you want to learn math, you're already a loser and should give up.
Oh god fucking damn it. You see? Calculus is actually useful! If my professors had mentioned any of that at ANY time, I might have realized that it's not just "Numbers and Sadism 101".
I'm actually a programmer, and I'd bet good money that I use aspects of calculus on a semi-regular basis, based on what you just said. The fact that it had to be self-learned years after going through two useless uni classes is just depressing.
>If my professors had mentioned any of that at ANY time
made me kek
It was just silence, user. SIlence, and the sound of chalk on a blackboard, mingled with an occasional awkward cough and a barely audible "integrate" or "differentiate".
He never even checked if we did it right. He just watched us work for 2 minutes and then erased it and put another one up.
Every. Single. Day.
I wish I was this antisocial.
Brainlet here. I've only ever thought of integrals as a way to find the area under a curve. Like to find the probability of a value falling within an interval, or for calculating consumer surplus from a demand function and a supply function.
Guess my business degree is showing, huh?
To be the first to publish a result is to compete against other practicioners of mathematics. Trust no one or see your work become stolen.
there is no point since everyone is 50 layers of abstraction deep and can't understand what anybody else is doing anyway
use colourful language to describe varables and make stories
use mathematics to draw pretty pictures thats what I do for a living. Try shader programming for instance, lots of fun pretty results and you learn the math as you go along.
dude its not that hard. just fucking integrate the function and interpret it, you dont need to understand fucking set theory and all that shit. i mean jeah you prolly understand it better but wtf you are kind of excaggerating all a bit.
Insecure?
Not really. I do understand the concepts of derivation and integration without knowing all that shit you said. Obviously not in the level of a mathematician, but enough to apply it.
That's the only reason Bobby Fischer played chess.
Can you explain pic related to me Captain Autism? Keep your spergs to a minimum please.
>It's tragic that most school teachers never show people how to navigate its depths.
That's because they barely know wtf they're doing. Have you ever taken an upperdivsion math course with math ed majors?
>holy shit we as a nation are fucked
>my kid will one day 'learn' from these fuckwits
>Guess my business degree is showing, huh?
Nothing wrong with that. That's honestly all I ever asked for in maths - for it to have some tangible practical application. Calculus just seemed to be just twisting numbers for the fuck of it and nobody felt the need to instruct otherwise.
>I'd really like to compete against others and feel superior to them. There's probably no greater joy than making someone feel like an idiot.
That's bad.
If you don't know something, you can't really are interested in that.
First you have to study it, then you can decide if you are interested or not. It sound pretty strange, but in something hard as math, and basically every science, most people really have no idea of what they are, and especially how study and research is in that science.
I don't think you can really are interested in something like the Riemann hypothesis if you barely know what a complex is