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The official ask math questions thread

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Mr.GuessWork said:

I'm entertained that you posted this in the pub. Your bullshit detector is going to wear out.

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Acidic_Sloth said:

i think it's part of what makes mathematics a difficult subject for a lot of people. math notation is a bitch and a half, especially at higher levels. half the time i find myself thinking, WTF?

in addition to a math notation course being required, i think a fractions course would also be highly beneficial. i tutor basic algebra and run into so much anxiety from students when fractions are thrown in the mix. it makes me sad.

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After a few math classes you learn to stop crying, eh... mostly. You conserve your tears at least. The WTF thoughts are reoccurring though. The notation is a real bitch at first because it's necessarily strict. Same thing with the vocabulary, the methodology, and the assumptions. The strictness confines the ideas, so that they can be developed through deduction without being ambiguous enough to create inconsistencies, but it still allows enough ambiguity to make the ideas useful anywhere that the strict confines are satisfied. In math a contradiction means something is falsely assumed to be true. That's powerful, since the world seems to have lots of contradictions, and it kicks ass when those contradictions can be resolved with a little bit of mathy thinking and modeling.

I don't know what to do about students not having basic math skills when they get to college. It sucks for everybody. Fractions are covered several time in middle school and high school, as is some basic math notation. It just doesn't seem to be effectively learned in many cases. There are lots of problems with the way math is taught in schools, which is why people hate math. They associate it with frustrating bullshit.

I was a physics tutor for a while, and that involved lots of math tutoring. The best way I found to deal with poor math skills was to crush math fear, which involved being emotionally supportive and playful while aggressively teasing out misunderstandings and lacking skills. I'd usually start every tutoring session by letting the students vent their frustrations and dish on their professors, and I'd agree that bullshit was bullshit. It's important to be reasonable when doing math. After unnecessary frustrations were diminished, we'd start to explore the math more seriously and figure out what was confusing and how to approach problems differently to clarify that confusion and get rid of it. It's fun when they get to that "ooooooh!" or "aha!" expression, and it's bigtime smiles and love after that.



On another topic, I'm tempted to ask a question about how fourier transforms relate the time domain to the frequency domain, but the question isn't well formulated enough yet to justify asking it, so I'll go read about it instead. Thanks for the motivation OP. I was bitter about it before.

Mr.GuessWork said:

So I've been staring at the tex button in the posting window for a few months, and I've been wondering if anybody has ever used latex on this site. I never bothered to learn it, but the formatting it provides for equations and such could be really useful in this thread.

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