What is it about math that makes it seem so difficult, but is actually pretty easy?
What is it about math that makes it seem so difficult, but is actually pretty easy?
In grade school they just give you formulas and tell you to memorize them. That's a terrible way to learn. Once you start to understand how proofs work and see for yourself how these formulas are derived I find it's much easier to remember them.
Also long division can suck a dick.
It takes patience with yourself, something most people struggle to find. Especially on here.
But long polynomial division is fucking fun!
>long division
>only down after grade 3
Your high IQ.
Meanwhile there are people like me with low IQs who just memorize random words and formulas and have no idea what's going on, and couldn't dream of applying the random letters and concepts on the page to real-world scenarios.
To actually answer your question, probably because people really are just fukn duuuumb so when they learn the stuff, it's very hard for them to teach anyone else the same shit. Instead they talk about it being hard when in reality everything boils down to the basics. But since most people can't evenhandle the basics anything more is just totally nuts. Then you start learning the shit yourself and yeah it's easy.. I was pretty convinced as a child I could be much further ahead even though I know I'm not crazy smart.. I can't be too sure of what average people can do but even a ten year old can do calculus if they know what it even means
I only have an IQ of 107, so unless you were in special ed classes, I don't see how you could have a problem solving these equations.
My IQ is probably around there or lower. You probably have a deeper interest than I do, so you concentrate more and invest more time into it. It's not so much memorizing how to do things that is the problem with me though, but actually "forming connections" and understanding the "why" behind it all.
Can you factor trinomials?
A combination of rote memorization teaching early on, disinterested teachers, and textbooks written in needlessly convoluted language.
People who barely grasp concepts but dont have the self awareness to actually test their knowledge and get frustrated when actually intelligent people question their logic
The make everything in life a million times harder to understand because their understanding is flawed to begin with, but there are more of these idiots than actually inquisitive people
long division goes back up
real answer coming thru
the shitty obtusiveness of almost lall math exposition that has nearly zero relation to how people actually think about math
It's like a language.
Before you know the rules of the language, before you've ever spoken it, and you're just hearing it, you're not going to pick up on the words.
It's hard when you're learning a new language because there's so many rules and new sounds and sentences and memorization that seem so foreign.
Once you've spent a few years actively using it, of course it's easy. It becomes a natural tongue to you.
All of math is the learning of a new language in hopes that it will have words and phrases better equipped to capture our universe. At the very end a mathematicians goal is to learn a new language by teaching themselves the grammar of a language that doesn't exist yet on the principle that it *ought* to exist, either in our minds or in the universe, because so much still is lost in translation.
I was pretty good at math when I was little until we got to long division. The teachers seemed to be completely incapable of explaining it in a way I could understand, which is weird because I was good enough at long multiplication and I was very good at geometry. I never learned long division and ever since my confidence was just tanked and I never did math homework, which is why I pretty much flunked out of high school.
I find it's harder to understand mathematics as a kid which is what fucked me over then. You're really good at memorizing how to robotically apply algorithms but you don't know what you're doing.
> and textbooks written in needlessly convoluted language.
What makes you believe that mathematics textbooks are written by people who cannot simplify the complexity of mathematics while maintaining a rigorous approach? An idiot can describe anything in a difficult manner, while the simplification of difficult subjects is best left to wiser men.
tl;dr: the book is fine - your lack of mental aptitude is the issue.
>le bad math teacher caused me to flunk out of high school
Keep telling yourself that, brainlet supreme.
Reid's Undergraduate commutative algebra is one of the worst textbooks I've read (or attempted to before I promptly switched). No, every thing you've ingrained into your head after years of mathematics that now seem obvious are not obvious to an undergraduate's first experience with commutative algebra. The style is somewhat rude to an inexperienced reader and the concepts are not explained too well. Reid can literally fuck off
Smoking weed helps to make more sense of it all I found, after all, physics and math are both pretty abstract things to understand
>calculus is easy and cute
You can always create a difficult calculus question that would be difficult by any standard.
This is totally different from long division where the procedure is exactly the same each time. Stupid graph.
What's 1b586c4514a354685abc56a52c68ca32568912377743bac_13 / 54adf316asghfhracz_36 ?
I'm not saying that it was everybody else's fault. I was just recounting what I think contributed to the attitude that made me fail. I had bad instructors in grade 4 that rushed through units and couldn't properly explain concepts to me. Being a helpless little kid, I simply lost confidence and gave up trying to understand deciding that I was "not good at math". It was only when I became a more level headed adult that I decided to give it another shot.
DUDE
Anyone who says maths is easy isn’t working on hard enough problems.
At what point are you supposed to find homology theory easy?
Homological algebra is practically trivial.
If you mean like homology theories in topology, then when you stop being a brainlet.
Math is taught like shit. Although I suppose everything is. Point stands.
If someone is genuinely interested, they'll find a way to learn.
School is the brainlet corral.
Not entirely convinced that uni is otherwise.
whoa stuff gets easier the more you practice it who woulda thunk it
Rote-memorization teachers.