alt Hacker NewsI'm sorry if this is a not a good question but as some one who never really had a good relationship with maths.
How do I get to a stage where I can just do math for the sake of understanding it.. to enjoy working on it.
I'm happy to "just do it" but is there some branch of match that might feel familiar and less removed from the real world?
Replies
stephen_cagle • today at 7:47 PM
I have no real answer to this.
People who I know who are actually really good at math (and are paid for it) say that there is no shortcut to interest and wrestling/thinking about the problems. You have to mule over things. You have to pack and unpack it over and over in your head.
If I had to put it in a phrase, it would be, "there is no shortcut to understanding without thinking".
I have a 2 tier-ed personal response to this question.
For "basic math" up to high school algebra and such, having an intuitive understanding of this lets me quickly do back of the envelope math anytime I hear something that sounds off, or something matches a "pattern" of a type of math I've done before.
Two concrete examples of this are:
For more advanced math, I personally find my high level understanding of the topics enough to appreciate how much goes into everyday things. The algorithms that govern our understanding of radio signals, information theory to pack bits into a given bandwidth and frequency, algorithms and math to ensure what was transitted is what is received, and how hundreds people can be using it at once and still get their data where it needs to go. The amount of math that goes into this all makes me appreciate the beauty of it all.