As a masters student in applied math, I am becoming more and more convinced that anyone could be doing what I am doing right now.
I seriously believe that the only thing that keeps people from becoming math graduates is lack of motivation to do so and not intrinsic ability, I strongly believe that, given some motivation, literally anyone could successfully adquire a mathematics master degree and even understand most if not all the material very well.
There seriously isnt anything special at all about what I am doing, you dont need some insane abstraction powers or whatever to "get" any of this, just studying it as you would any other topic is more than enough.
Is this true or is my perspective absurdly skewed?
Thoughts?
If you most know for some sort of dick measuring contest I focus on pde theory and numerics.
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What a shit site
>math
It s too fricking everywhere tho
Indian detected.
You're just ignorant of how stupid people can be. I know a guy who failed every math class since 6th grade. He's an adult now and he literally can't answer stuff like "2 eggs cost $3, then what do 5 eggs cost?" And this guy unironically became a lawyer.
You honeslty think that if this guy suddenly had all the motivation of your tipical austitic math grad student, he wouldnt be able to successfully learn higher math?
I just cant believe that.
Motivation is part of your personality. What are you even saying, that if people were different they would not be the same?
I also believe that the baseline population 100 IQ is enough to understand math but people don't have the motivation and that isnt something you can just force yourself to have.
Also i blame Bourbaki for creating "make math look harder than it is" culture
That doesnt sound like moronation, he has discalculia, it,'s neurological and not tied to any form of intelligence.
*dyscalculia
Anyways it's a lot like dyslexia, it has next to 0 effect on other cognitive functions
>discalculia
I honestly think I have a minor case of this. I can understand abstract concepts better than the large majority of people and I'm good at higher level math, but I can't do basic math problems in my head. I always have to use a calculator for arithmetic.
I used to think this myself but then noticed that when pressured I can do almost any operation mentally and that mental math is very trainable.
Ive come to realize the issue is that people like us are adverse to spending effort in doing things that we consider trivial details that someone else could easily do, that someone else being a calculator in this case.
>he has a condition that will affect his daily life negatively forever, but that has nothing to do with intelligence, which is the thing you use to solve problems and improve your life
I hereby invent calculational intelligence. Now iy's related to intelligence and he sucks at buying eggs. Mentally moronic for sure.
3*5/2 = 7.50
>dyscalculia
I would bet close to 50% of the West's population cannot solve that in their head, likely 25% couldn't solve it with a calculator.
https://bettermarketing.pub/the-a-w-third-pounder-failed-because-people-didnt-understand-fractions-a86b966a973a
>Anyways it's a lot like dyslexia, it has next to 0 effect on other cognitive functions
The literature claims this but it's clearly bullshit cope. If you track down where these claims originate it always leads to cross-citation obscurity where one paper says dyscalculia has nothing to do with general cognitive ability and the sources for that claim are A, you track down A and it makes vague references regarding general cognitive ability and uses source B, track down B and it's practically non related at that point etc. There is never hard evidence where dyscalculia is measured against general intelligence and is shown to be unrelated.
>https://bettermarketing.pub/the-a-w-third-pounder-failed-because-people-didnt-understand-fractions-a86b966a973a
I still don't believe this. There is just no way this is true. People talk about concepts like halves, thirds and quarters all the time. Surely everyone understands at least those.
>I still don't believe this. There is just no way this is true. People talk about concepts like halves, thirds and quarters all the time
The people who understand those concepts talk about them. If only half the population understands them then it will still appear like people talk about them all the time. It's survivorship bias.
>Surely everyone understands at least those.
I attended a religious university for a little while that accepted anybody with a HS diploma. There was a black kid in my dorm the first few weeks who didn't sign up for classes and genuinely thought it was optional. He was waiting to get on the basketball team and thought he was in basketball camp I guess. The admin didn't think anyone could be that stupid so he slipped through the cracks. Pretty sure my RA said he was getting kicked out for blatantly stealing other people's stuff and other lawbreaking and that's when they realized he didn't sign up for classes. Right before he left he was trying to explain to the RA that he didn't know how his CD ended up in someone else's CD player he obviously stole and left out in the open in his room where the owner from down the hall coincidentally walked in and saw it. It was a comically ridiculous situation.
People are more stupid than you can imagine.
Your basketball playa definitely isnt normal tho, probably literally moronic as well. Im of course not trying to argue literal morons can do math.
YMMV?
>YMMV?
a genuine moron: exhibit A
I guess it's because they make those choices on a whim without really thinking about what those words actually mean. They see a 3, they see a 4, they pick 4 because who gives a shit about a fricking burger. Happens to me too. I guess you'll find a correlation between such brainfart choices and adhd.
>I would bet close to 50% of the West's population cannot solve that in their head,
Bullshit. It's just fricking counting, and presented in a familiar context. Any randomly selected moron off the street can probably count how much their eggs cost.
>If you seriously think this I don't know what to say.
You should say "I need to interact with the bottom half of society more because I genuinely don't grasp anything outside my limited circle of friends/peers and assume they are representative of the world"
https://web.archive.org/web/20210630124439/https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fractions-where-it-all-goes-wrong/
>On standard fraction addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems with equal denominators (e.g., 3/5+4/5) and unequal denominators (e.g., 3/5+2/3), 6th and 8th graders tend to answer correctly only about 50% of items. Studies of community college students have revealed similarly poor fraction arithmetic performance
>Your basketball playa definitely isnt normal tho,
He "completed" a high school degree. That is the standard they set. At the time 12% of US population dropped out of HS so we can assume some % close to that was just as dumb as he was.
>probably literally moronic as well
He was above 70 IQ I'm sure of that. I've met people who are borderline and it's quite obvious at that level. This bball playa came across as only slightly below average for a typical black person.
>50% of people can't figure out 2x=3 5x=?
These are the people who post about how the world is about to end lmao
If you seriously think this I don't know what to say.
>He's an adult now and he literally can't answer stuff like "2 eggs cost $3, then what do 5 eggs cost?"
It's literally impossible to answer
Doesn't this kind of support OPs point? This dude probably would've been decent at math if he had any instrinsic motivation, but he was reasonably smart enough to get by in a decent career and life course without it so he was never really incentived to put real effort into math.
It's like pointing to somebody who never goes to the gym and sits on the couch all day and saying "look how naturally weak they are".
That doesn't make him stupid. Maybe he didn't care about midwit school shit and had better things to think about or had bigger problems in his life. I was never able to do math until I became rich and suddenly had time and money. You speak Iike a midwit that just calls people stupid without any eleboration to feel better about himself. Sounds like you had a pretty good and easy life.
>I was never able to do math until I became rich and suddenly had time and money
indeed what is taken for granted as a child - time - is that which few adults have in abundance. if you grew up poor, it takes years of financial stability to reach a productive equilibrium; that is unless you were one the driven few.
>That doesn't make him stupid.
It totally makes him stupid. I could have intuitively figured it out as a child before I even took algebra. All you need to realize is each egg is 6 quarters so 5*6 quarters is 30 quarters, 7*4 is 28 so 7 dollars and the remainder is 50 cents. Viola $7.50. You could count it on your fingers if needed.
>2 eggs cost $3
fricking inflation man thanks brandon
see this post
maths pays shit and you can get more money for contributing less to society
$7.50 for 5 eggs is a rip off. Where are you buying your groceries from?
>special boy
>mental moronation
Your mom wasn't wrong. She was just being nice.
She tried to tell you are moronic without using that word. You're a special needs boy.
>applied math
>I focus on pde theory and numerics
Start working in anabelian geometry and then we can talk.
And whether being good at math makes you special or not is besides the point anyway, the point being that, even if we grant that math is particularly difficult and requires talent, the fact remains that most of it is quite useless and will stay useless for all we know. Some of it will probably find some application in twenty or fifty years after being discovered, but the vast majority of modern math will just stay between the covers of some obscure math journal collecting dust in the corner of a university library. It is a kind of glorified sudoku, an abstract crossword puzzle.
Paradoxically enough, the (relatively) easy stuff, like the stuff you're doing, often turns out to be the most useful, so there is no practical need to even care about most difficult math nowadays. As I said, this may change in the future because sometimes an application is found even for the most seemingly useless results, but don't hold your breath.
What is even the point of this post you dont even discuss the question at hand
So you basically speculate that some people are just incapable of doing math, mainly due to how they think and their short term memory.
Im pretty damn sure both factors you mentioned are trainable, I absolutely do feel mine improved as I progressed through my studies
Some people are just stupid. Their brains simply have less short-term memory to hold mental objects while they manipulate them, and thus are fundamentally incapable of understanding certain things even given infinite time.
Take for example an argument of the form A implies B, B implies C, C implies D, A therefore D. In order to "understand" this you need enough memory to simultaneously hold all of these mental objects in your brain at once. Some people, by the time they get to the third step, they've already forgotten the first. There's no way to pack this kind of understanding into their heads.
Another problem that exacerbates their stupiditiy is the fact that they don't really know how to think correctly. I suspect that thinking itself is an activity that requires technique, though I can't really elaborate on my own method and nobody can teach such a technique, it's highly probable that other people don't do it the same way as me. Thinking involves skills like organizing thoughts into groups or patterns, knowing how long to keep a mental object in memory before switching it out for something else, offloading certain types of calculation into other brain regions (such as by generating visual analogies mid-thought as a mnemonic device) and thinking about how to adjust your thought process in order to tackle different kinds of problems most efficiently. Stupid people must have less capacity for reflection on these topics and must therefore have worse thought technique.
>Take for example an argument of the form A implies B, B implies C, C implies D, A therefore D. In order to "understand" this you need enough memory to simultaneously hold all of these mental objects in your brain at once
Alright, how about you prove the four-color theorem while keeping all the steps in mind? Yeah, thought so.
>Take for example an argument of the form A implies B, B implies C, C implies D, A therefore D. In order to "understand" this you need enough memory to simultaneously hold all of these mental objects in your brain at once. Some people, by the time they get to the third step, they've already forgotten the first
You mean not everyone experiences this? Frick me...
>Take for example an argument of the form A implies B, B implies C, C implies D, A therefore D. In order to "understand" this you need enough memory to simultaneously hold all of these mental objects in your brain at once.
But that's obviously wrong, you moron. You sound like a midwit npc with no capacity for self-reflection pretending to understand congnition. You only need to consider one step at a time to understand why A implies D.
lol
Tell me more about how you don't understand anything because the deduction chain from any first principles to any useful conclusion is thousands of steps long.
>the deduction chain from any first principles to any useful conclusion is thousands of steps long.
>IT ALWAYS WAS
did you invent counting or writing?
oh i was agreeing with you
>Take for example an argument of the form A implies B, B implies C, C implies D, A therefore D. In order to "understand" this you need enough memory to simultaneously hold all of these mental objects in your brain at once. Some people, by the time they get to the third step, they've already forgotten the first
>Take for example an argument of the form A implies B, B implies C, C implies D, A therefore D. In order to "understand" this you need enough memory to simultaneously hold all of these mental objects in your brain at once.
There is this great hack tool out there, called "pen and paper". You should try it some time.
If a moron like me can handle university level math with it, surely a genius like you can make groundbreaking discoveries.
t. 110 IQ midwit.
if its not special why can't i
You surely actually are able to do math.
I mean, what have you tried? Have you gone to uni for math?
>Thoughts?
Yes, i wanted to learn math but got demoralized by dis vid: https://youtu.be/HeQX2HjkcNo
Wat do? I don't want to waste my time learning bullshit that will get throw in to the can in some years bc it was all bullshit. I want to learn something practical meaning something that has the highest possibilities to be used in day to day life and math that will improve my way of thinking, any suggestions?
As for you opinion, i'd that every sane, healthy human being can indeed learn math, but 95+ is plain moronic, either by what they eat, what their mothers ate, what they breathe, what they hear, watch, interact with, their race, their genotypes and i can go on and on but you get the idea, most ppl are not healthy individuals, humans are off balace from nature and if want thing im 100% sure is that went something goes off in nature... it eliminates itself. I think we are at that stage, too late to turn back, what? you think ppl are going to change their way of life by now? No. Just enjoy the ride. The next atlantis cataclysmic is coming.
remoralize yourself
Wow. Thanks pal.
Just remember that the things on the left are impossible without the things on the right.
don't listen to anything that moron says. he just wants clicks and to sound smart. he takes the musings of people with actual intelligence and spins them into clickbait. Also if that video was enough to dissuade you from a career in math, you weren't going to make it anyway.
unironically learn to code
I envy you. I wish I could do math
I used to think the same until I started teaching. Plenty of otherwise bright kids get filtered by basic calculus and barely squeak by with a lot of effort while others sail through despite skipping every lecture to make time for their 7th daily fap to anime traps.
But I have teached.
I was a volunteer highschool math teacher for a group of low income students.
It was hard as frick but eventually they all got quite decent for their level.
All but one guy that I am actually sure was mentally moronic, literally.
YMMV obviously, but I'm curious what their level was and whether it was a mandatory activity or not.
In my experience, anybody (or almost) can learn algebraic manipulation and even become quite good at it but a fair number of students don't really get what's happening behind those manipulations and even a little abstraction will throw them off completely.
Seriously, a lot of students just hit an intellectual wall when series drop.
>get what's happening behind those manipulations
The whole point of algebras is that you can forget what's happening and focus on the object manipulation to get your result. It's literally a hack to bypass the extremely limited number of discrete symbols human working memory can hold.
>but I'm curious what their level was and whether it was a mandatory activity or not
It was mandatory of course
These where about 30 17-18 yo men
At the beginning of the year (last year for them actually) they struggled with stuff like simple multiplication and seriously thought solving a quadratic equation was inputing the numbers in the calculator.
I worked hard as frick and in the end they had a good grasp of what a function is, trigonometry, logarithms and even some basic linear algebra notions, I actually taught them what a vector space was and wr spent our last few sessions discussing more general definitios (watered down to their level of course, nothing insanely rigorous).
I cant overstate how hard I worked, I made them lots of homework, which very well thought out problems, looked for countless examples and real world problems, explained how things where developed historically, spent multiple sessions drilling simple arithmetic, etc.
One thing that I also did, specially since they were all men and no one at the school gave a frick, was using humiliation as a tool, it may sound fricked up but they responded to this insanely well, and I made sure to show the humiliation victim in a good light in front of his peers after they had improved.
They all loved me and were sadened when the year ended, some went on to apply to trade school for it stuff even.
I think I did well honestly
>One thing that I also did, specially since they were all men and no one at the school gave a frick, was using humiliation as a tool, it may sound fricked up but they responded to this insanely well
Based
You did well. Personal experience is personal, of course, I've been teaching college or university for the past eight years (not counting TA-ing in grad school) and, like I said, my experience is that past a certain point some kids just don't get it (though they might get a good grade by putting in a lot of work) and others get it effortlessly (though they might get a bad grade due to sheer laziness).
Could you hypothetically make all of them great at math if you had an unlimited amount of time and energy at your disposal? Maybe but, honestly, I doubt it.
Your Mileage May Vary
When I took AP physics in high school, our teacher trained the class to pass the AP exams by having everyone memorize every different variation of the kinematic formulas that appear on the exam. Nearly the entire class opted to take this approach to learning physics except two of us in the class, myself and another guy who ended up becoming a doctor. We didn't bother memorizing the formulas because we figured out how they were derived from each other.
Most people genuinely do not think well, learn very slowly and rely mostly on rote memorization for intellectual tasks. There's a reason schools (up to and including universities) tend to emphasize rote memorization for learning. For most people it's the optimal method. It's only an annoyance for people with higher IQ's.
kek same thing happened in highschool with a friend and me
>rely mostly on rote memorization for intellectual tasks.
its fricking over for me
at least its enough for what I want to do in life.
>I cant overstate how hard I worked, I made them lots of homework, which very well thought out problems, looked for countless examples and real world problems, explained how things where developed historically, spent multiple sessions drilling simple arithmetic, etc.
One thing that I also did, specially since they were all men and no one at the school gave a frick, was using humiliation as a tool, it may sound fricked up but they responded to this insanely well, and I made sure to show the humiliation victim in a good light in front of his peers after they had improved.
very based
>I think I did well honestly
You did do well anon, you probably changed some lives since you gave these guys not only confidence in their ability, but also reason to believe they're not dumb and can solve tasks that at first seemed impossible with dedication and hard work. I seriously wish I had someone who cared like you do as my teacher
You May Mush veganas
>skipping every lecture to make time for their 7th daily fap to anime traps
literally me
realized that in abstract algebra. I swear I could teach this stuff to a motivated third grader
No, it's impossible
source: me, i'm dumb as shit
Yup basically.
Idk maths but I'm gonna learn it to teach my kids. Until then I have better things to do.
I disagree. a huge majority of people can only think in internal monologue and try to make do in math by manipulating textual descriptions. these will never make it.
>try to make do in math by manipulating textual descriptions
There is no way this is true. If they can pass middle school algebra or meme triangle proofs they can reason without subvocalization.
it is based, of course, on guesswork, because I don't see into their heads. but they were trying to eta-expand a definition inside another one, recited the text of a theorem substituting the actual objects featuring in the math problem and if they tried to do mental algebra they often forgot where the parenthesis ended because infix notation and human grammar do not mix well in these parts (indo-european and uralic languages spoken here). I think the most economical hypothesis is that they were doing math via textual substitutions.
>applied math
Sure
>math
No.
It really depends on child development. If you are a kid who played video games, organized sports, or even played some made up rule-based games as a kid with some friends, then you are likely to "get" mathematics. Kids who often blatantly broke the rules in games, insisted on using cheat codes in a video game, watched brain melting television, or just "went with the flow" of trends are likely to be those who struggle to understand mathematics. Now, to say environmental influence is negligible would be wrong to say, a student who grows up in a working class family is less likely to succeed in mathematics then that of a bourgeoisie family. What is horrible is that in previous centuries the lower-class still had mentally stimulating activities, they were just often non-institutional and more physical, but now the lower-classes literally have means of entertainment-such as watching tiktok and instant gratifying utilities-which work AGAINST the modes of thought which lead to success within the sciences as a whole (attention span, critical thinking, prolonged thinking, pattern recognition, etc).
>in short, no, not everyone has the appropriate upbringing or suitable learning conditions to have the ability to do mathematics.
>applied
There's the keyword
You’re wrong.
Prove me wrong by trying to tutor me.
Many have tried, many more have failed.
There will be some lower limit of IQ where no matter how hard they try, they will still fail. Outside of those unfortunate people, yes, any of them could be trained to do what you are doing. How was this not obvious to you?
Applied math, yeah most people who graduate college could probably replace you. Same thing with professorships/degrees in engineering and life science. The real irreplaceable positions are in physics/pure math, those guys are hard to find.
You idiots seriously cant help yourselves can't you?
If you unironically post shit like this you're 100% a stupid undergrad
Oh c'mon. 90% of positions in life science/applied math/engineering are jokes. Any moron with a graduate degree could fill them. Of course there are some exceptions in some highest level research faculty.
In pure math/physics everybody who's mediocre goes into teaching. Actually finding people to publish papers in it is tough. It's almost unfair the difference between the caliber of math/physics necessary compared to all the other sciences.
t. applied
I'm in PhD pure math. Your take is essentially lazy and full of shit. Yes "anyone can do math" in a sense that anybody with an avrage iq can master some basic arithmetic skills. But no not "anyone can do math" in a sense that it requires certain innate ability to handle abstract mathematical concepts/structures, very efficient working memory and the right social conditions.
You are surrounded by the smartest of the smart. You probably haven't had a serious conversation with someone with an IQ below 85 in years.
>the smartest of the smart
>masters in applied math
have you met masters students?
Apparently, the ability to write gramatically correct English is.
The Pisa results disagree with you: https://www.unz.com/akarlin/stupid-people/
I went to high school with a guy who couldn't learn how to count to ten in Spanish. The Spanish teacher made him go up to the board at the beginning of every class and write down the numbers up to ten. This went on for about two weeks before our teacher gave up.
The problem with math is that it is purely abstract and taught completely out of any concrete context. It needs physical and linguistic analogical models and the learner needs a philosophy background in different schools of thought to be able to use math to its final use which is in its application. Math does not make sense on its own, only when it's coupled with outside academic fields.
>am becoming more and more convinced that anyone could be doing what I am doing right now.
This is a sign you're good at what you do; however, you only think this because it's easy to you. Don't underestimate what it took to get to this position or this line of thinking. You will encounter many people who cannot fathom it, and just seemingly don't have the same experiences and brain that allow them to make it possible as you did.
>Single child syndrome kids be like
The greatest curse of the modern world is that parents generally have ~2 kids and many just have one. You are severely crippled when it comes to understanding humanity if you don't come from a household of at least 4 kids. You wouldn't even think to make such a stupid thread if you grew up with more than just yourself.
People are very bad at math. Like incredibly bad at it. Even if at the graduate level. If you find it easy, good for you, you actually are smart. Most people aren't and couldn't work through a proof if it sat there dancing in front of them for hours.
>applied math
I stopped reading here.
I must be special because I don't get math
For some reason I'm obsessed with it but no matter how long and hard I try, I don't get it 🙁
What in particular don't you get in math? Have you tried meta-cognitively analyzing your failure?
I don't get anything, not even pic related.
I don't get numbers. I get caught up on any number and start trying to find some profound meaning to it, if that makes sense.
I get overloaded with all the numbers and signs I see and feel this urge to focus on each individual one until I have some kind of realization and understanding of it.
Anons helped me earlier and I understood how it worked but I compulsively try to then put it into some larger context or something like that.
>I don't get anything, not even pic related.
This makes perfect sense but seems like it's from a more advanced book, not a first course. Where's it from?
Basic Mathematics by Serge Lang
Sucks to suck.
This the worst demo that I could possibly seen ever in my life. This is to complex for what it is; just a simple demo would be :
a+b=0 i.e. a=-b i.e. -a=b
also the statement is false it's not supposed to be an implication cause this is just a re-writting
The first six books of the Elements of Euclid : in which coloured diagrams and symbols are used instead of letters for the greater ease of learners
here: http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=22A95FAA36582E883D04752481600BD7 OR http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=C8BC0A2D817924D999328CE529A7AA62
Thank you very very much, Anon! This means a lot to me
And thank you for getting the links
I'm gonna start right now
maybe you'd also like
Proofs without words I-III - Nelsen
A Pathway Into Number Theory 2e - R.P. Burn
Groups: A Path to Geometry - R.P. Burn
My goodness...
How do I even repay you for your help?
Thank you, I'll read them
i have some ideas
That is fantastic, thank you.
There's an online version of Byrne's Euclid too, complete with archaic typographical marks
https://www.c82.net/euclid/
nice
You live in a bubble and the internet is often filled with college level IQ folk, the average person doesn't even touch laptops or desktop computers for example. Most people are functionally illiterate and have only a 5th grade understanding of the world.
It feels easy to you because intelligence in math is based primarily on one's subconscious.
(OP)
HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA are you fricking trolling? you're completely wrong lmao. Only a small group of people can study math at the graduate level (140 IQ +) unless your graduate program is completely sub-par
Would you like me to tell you how I can tell you're insecure or would you like to keep it a mystery?
want to know how I know your sexuality?
You found out about your dad's prolapsed anus.
>I seriously believe that the only thing that keeps people from becoming math graduates is lack of motivation to do so and not intrinsic ability, I strongly believe that, given some motivation, literally anyone could successfully adquire a mathematics master degree and even understand most if not all the material very well.
Correct. It's just that shit can become really uninteresting, some cope by saying you're moronic but it's really boring sometimes. It's about who has the brain least fried by dopamine
No. I've tutored hundreds of people in math. While the vast majority can reach proficiency, the training time varies wildly. Believe it or not, most people reach the highest level that their IQ will allow.
I know for myself sometimes the amount of time and attention isn't enough for all classes at the same time, some I actually do fine when recovering in tests it's just because I lacked the motivation to use more time of my day for Math.
What you describe superficially is that the student can't make the concepts click, which happens with most people. But if we're pedant, what's happening is that there's a threshold of time in which students and teachers think a concept has _clicked_ and if you didn't get it by then you're not intelligent enough. I guess in that case there really is an amount of time the student can spend to get where everyone else is. But only if he isn't moronic and he's just behind in a high volume of concepts. Like Calculus, you'd can be behind in algebraic manipulation, the concept of function, limits, trig identities, etc. (And maybe the reason was that they were moronic in the first place indeed, but could be they were just not motivated.)
People certainly have varying levels of motivation, but they also vary significantly in how quickly they pick up new material. For some people, it will take months or years to master basic algebra. Someone high IQ on the other hand, might master it in a few weeks. While some people certainly do lose motivation and give up, to all but the highest IQ that's essentially what happens to everyone. People reach a point in their math education where the amount of effort to continue becomes so high that they give up and stop learning, which is why I say that the majority of people eventually reach their optimal potential in math. They may have wanted to go further, but their IQ limitation stopped them.
The only exceptions are people who are relatively high IQ and can keep learning math indefinitely, but instead of becoming mathematicians they master all of the math they need for their profession and then focus on other domains, e.g. programming, science, medicine, finance, etc. But for people below, say, an IQ of 140 they eventually reach a point where the effort becomes too much, and they give up.
>People reach a point in their math education where the amount of effort to continue becomes so high that they give up and stop learning,
the response to give up is not only related to with how arduous the learning process becomes as it pertains to how difficult the student is finding the material but also the students levels of endurance to stick it through, if you clone a student and give one of the clones much more neurotic and weaker ability to stick through cognitive workload and turmoil he's likely going to give up far quicker than the other clone who has more resilience allowing him to push through that kind of mental taxing.
also illness or environmental influences on motivation levels such as depression or something like that.
a lot of people give up because they realize higher math has no real world use.
all stem stuff can be done by literal morons, I don't get why people are all prestigious about being a stemgay
After chatting with older people (best ones are those soon to retire (they give no shits about secrets)), I got consistently told that education purposely bores the students. Quite a lot of know-how becomes repulsive to acquire after remembering the hours and hours of time wasted on useless lectures, instead of learning by doing.
I myself was in the construction industry and after learning the magical terminology, I realized that most 15 year olds could do site management just fine.
So many engineers with diplomas that fail at basic reading comprehension and the sheer amount of dumbfrickery hidden behind bullshit explanations.
>I got consistently told that education purposely bores the students. Quite a lot of know-how becomes repulsive to acquire after remembering the hours and hours of time wasted on useless lectures, instead of learning by doing.
Always had the feeling lectures were trash compared to reading, and reading useless without actual practice. The idea of educators boring their students to the point of failure, out of incompetence or disinterest is a little funny.
>So many engineers with diplomas that fail at basic reading comprehension and the sheer amount of dumbfrickery hidden behind bullshit explanations.
Basically, you can get away with messing up on the job if you have enough chutzpah and verbiage?
>As a masters student in applied math, I am becoming more and more convinced that anyone could be doing what I am doing right now.
I could say the same. Perhaps not a masters, but doing phys bsc. Its all really about motivation and discipline.
i developed mathphobia due to bad teaching on my early academic life and got my diploma performing only on non-math related classes altough did well on biology, now i'm learning how to do basic operations on fractions with different denominators.
i really want to finish this pre-algebra course and in fact will, but things are getting boring from now on. the least logical thing to do right now was spend time posting on anime forums but i really wanted to know if yall wouldn't have any idea on how to make this a more dynamic experience, like i thought adding a abacus could help to change the vibe a little, i don't know. i have started the journey on december or january, and is going well but not at maximal speed due to related reason, i think my worst enemy is knowing that these are for kids, adding to the fact that i'm not challenged with any of these and just repeating the tables in different ways makes me want to do literally anything but this.
>try picking something more challenging then
i can't. most the books i open and the very first page already contain language i'm not used with, i really need to do it step by step.
Im a highschool kid with an interest in math and since u say youre an applied mathematician, whats the field like? im gonna apply for a major in math next year
Applied math is extremely broad, so anything theres bound to be something that interests you in it.
I find it the perfect field because it has the rigour of pure mathematics but you only ever study useful things.
You will be doing proofs and learning about cutting edge mathematics but you will be doing it to solve actual problems, you will also naturally learn quite a bit of computer science and programming.
It's the perfect interception IMO.
no one is autistic or moronic
mind over matter
That can be said about any subject that favors knowledge and experience over talent, its more like a scale, and math ability is somewhere in the middle
And which subjects require pure talent?
Idk singing? acting? Like I said its more of a scale not just pure this/that
it's normal to feel like things you don't find very difficult should not be difficult for other people
>every sentence starts with "I"
you sure do seem to like talking about yourself
I have a master's in pure math. Graduated with perfect grades, won multiple awards and a scholarship. Have a paper in algebraic topology on the way. I think a fair amount of people with reasonable intelligence/ability to understand abstraction could do this. You're underestimating; however, how stupid the average person is. There are a lot of people no matter how hard they study that just can't into abstraction even with endless hours of effort. A lot of people still get filtered by crap like calculus I or II. Generally speaking the reason to understand abstraction is a sort of talent and a lot of people are terrible at it. Think of this, most people can't even begin to conceptualize what pure mathematics are doing or studying and even then you have to connect it to something tangelible for them to even have even an inch of understanding. Most people just think math is "much numbers ,much calculus". I don't think the average person could understand things like algebraic gometey, higher algebra, functional analysis, topology, etc without some threshold level of intelligence. If the average IQ of the population is 100, 30 points below that is a mentally retarted. Now, the average math major should fall in the range of 130+ and accordingly subtract 30 points and your back to the average but think about this now...
tl;dr partially agree but it's still a very small percentage of the population that could even with dedication. The average person is an idiot.
>I don't think the average person could understand things like algebraic gometey, higher algebra, functional analysis, topology, etc without some threshold level of intelligence.
There's really nothing so esoteric there, I think moreso than simply 'understanding' them, producing proofs is substantially more difficult and does require more raw intellect and much more effort (this goes back to p vs np actually)
That's normal thing. The more you familiarise with information or task, more it becomes trivial and obvious to you. And you start thinking there's nothing difficult and everyone can do it. Believe me, it's not like that. I had the same phase with programming
Anybody can do math with the right teachings. You're just an old boomer impatient with the younger generation. Go frick yourself and die. A teacher always tries to find the most optimal and efficient ways of describing how to solve a problem and all of you fricking fail. So much for your degrees when you can't even apply it in the right way.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan
EXPLAIN. HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN???? WHY CANT I DO THIS?? EXPLAIN NOW
would you want to be god gifted but ridiculed, patronized, and forced to suffer menial labor while your talents waste away; the only person capable of understanding your unique genius a thousand miles away?
what kind of superintelligent person would say math problem is so easy it's a fricking joke
Yes you are right. It is simply a choice that a person makes on what they do with their time.
yes, OP, solving PDE numerically doesn't require super intelligence.
But without super intelligence, you won't be able to understand deeper mathematical concepts, like why holomorphic functions are important in number theory
All these self-professed geniuses angry at the truth. Yes you frickers, you're just a dull c**t who chose to spend time on a dull subject that the general population avoid because of how boring it is and you have become good at it compared to a small population who chose to try it.
What a clever boy you are.
(No one is impressed)
This is why STEMgays seethe at chad earning 400k at Goldman or BCG with an MBA and an undergrad in psychology (which he majored in because it was 80% female)
OP, you have spent far too long in STEM academia surrounded by people who are not completely moronic
The average normie is completely moronic
I have a masters in applied math, currently teach at CC, and I can absolutely fricking assure you, most of these kids are completely fricking moronic and are not even remotely capable of learning how to code let alone numerical mathematics. Their brains simply cannot process logically that quickly and efficiently.
There is a subset of people who are not complete fricking morons, who are capable of some level of quantitative reasoning. It's not necessarily always the top math students; I teach College Algebra a lot, which is literally a fricking high school level subject these kids have to take again in college, maybe 20% of the class is capable of reading a word problem, understanding the formula that it describes, and reaching a solution. The kind of reasoning most of these kids have, I don't even fricking know I literally do not understand how you read a math problem and your brain doesn't just translate it to numbers.
And the kids who take a college algebra class are, we can assume, still smarter than the 40% or so of the population who never goes to college.
You're certainly right that it's not a dick-measuring contest, anyone with a basic level of aptitude, given the right education program, can probably handle up to computational fluid dynamics given sufficient motivation and discipline but that excludes the majority of the population who simply hasn't got the hardware for such rational abstraction
>currently a student
>anyone could successfull aquire degree
You know what's gonna happen now that you've temped fate, right?
Also you forget how fundamentally lazy and moronic the average person is.
My experience, as a Mathematics masters grad, is that if it seems easy, you're in the kiddy pool. I met a ton of people who thought it was easy in university, 99.9% of those were just walking examples of Dunning-Cruger.
>My experience, as a Mathematics masters grad, is that if it seems easy, you're in the kiddy pool.
It doesnt seem easy to me, its hard, but its definitely doable and reasonably difficult. My point is that you dont need to have superhuman intelligence or something to get a math degree but rather that most people could probably achieve one given enough discipline and determination.
My point is explicitly NOT that math is easy.
Also, I go to a top 50 worldwide school for math, my institution definitely isnt sub par and my program or whatever isnt whatered down or something.
Could you explain a bit more?
I failed college algebra 3 times because I hated the hours spent on graphing homework. No homework, 1/3 of the grade is zero. It was too tedious for me. After leaving collegeI pursued a career as an electrician and used trigonometry on a regular basis to troubleshoot and confirm voltage issues in 3 phase circuits, used basic geometry formulas almost daily constructing different installations and algebra for a myriad of different calculations. You don't need to know any of this if you're just going to be a temporary helper and just install light fixtures, switches & receptacles, but like I said, I made a career out of it. Mathematics isn't difficult but it has a lot of rules to follow. If you don't like rules you're not going to like math. I couldn't handle the tedium until I realized you can make cool shit and save a ton of trial and error with just basic high school level math.
Forgot to post picrel. Also I'm fully aware that the level of math I'm refering to really has nothing to do with this thread. I posted here just to point out that everyday things that are taken for granted are installed maintained and function because math is awesome and almost anyone can apply it.
I took arts in college. Now I'm interested in math and programming. How do I start reading? Any text books or links to courses where I can cover all the topics? I don't want to hop sites for every single concept.
khan academy
Check the pinned post.
math that requires little visualization is piss easy
any real visualization required and i'm out
I think everyone goes through this.
First it's
>Trust the science, they're smarter than us
>I'll do my own thinking once I'm qualified
Then it's
>Wait, I'm science now and I'm fricking moronic
>Have I been trusting other morons my entire life?
Then you start becoming more skeptical of things. Then after a while you eventually you start becoming more aware of how different most normal people actually are. Not people who struggle with highschool math etc, most of these probably could improve to postgrad level with the right conditions, but rather the people who don't even do highschool math, the kinds of people who don't have that voice in their head that runs a constant introspection loop etc. You probably knew a bunch of people like this in school and were aware that you were "different", but for some reason people only seem to get a sense for how how different (ie basically another species) after they cross the
>Wait you can be completely moronic and still do science?
threshold.
>I'll do my own thinking once I'm qualified
>wait, im science now and im fricking moronic
In my academic and professional pursuits I never got to the "im science now" part because I have always been aware of how moronic I am. You can't be science and be moronic (for me it's data science).
>voice in their head running a constant introspection loop
Mine just keeps reminding me how moronic I am. How pathetic and amateurish my work is. How little I know what I'm talking about.
You're wrong. You just think that because it's true for you. In reality 10% of people can do advanced mathematics. Which is both a lot and a little
Btw most of the 10% can don't because they'd rather not live on ramen and their advisors cum
>I am becoming more and more convinced that anyone could be doing what I am doing right now
If they could force themselves to. But they can't. Because what you are doing is highly unnatural.