Time for a poll

[chickenfeet]

I needed an excuse to use the user pic voted most popular by a random sample of sentient beings. I've also had some interesting on and off line convos and comments about math(s) recently so I thought what we really need is more ticky boxes. Lo, I bring you the great math(s) poll!

[Poll #826509]

Comments

[adjectivegail]

I'm afraid I don't really feel the poll sufficiently expresses my opinions/feelings/relationship with maths/etc, so I shall respond here instead :-)

I hated maths all the way through school until I was 13, at which point I was given a teacher who was actually able to explain the whys behind everything, at which point it made so much more sense and I really enjoyed it. In fact I did so well that they wanted to move me up a stream, however I categorically refused to move because I knew it was the teaching style that was making the difference. Hers was the only classroom with a number line stuck up on the wall above the board (-20 to +20 I think, but basically just something to give us an idea of 'which way to go'), and we got teased a lot about that but I didn't care because having it there meant I was actually able to work things out.

Our GCSE chemistry class also had quite a lot of maths in it, what with how many moles of atoms in the thingy and therefore how much does the other stuff weigh. I couldn't do it, and wound up insisting on taking the intermediate paper becuase I knew I could do the chemistry, just not the maths.

So I suppose that means "fear and loathe", but also "much beauty", but the most important would be "bloody difficult".

I did A-level Biology, Chemistry and Psychology, all of which required maths in some way or another. The Chem teacher managed to explain how to do molar calculations and all of a sudden it made sense. I was so relieved. The psychology coursework probably involved the most (and most complicated) maths, as we had to work out probabilities and significances and so forth. The maths itself wasn't hard but some of the concepts behind it was, and those were important because it would affect which significance test you used.

So, I did some maths work beyond GCSE, not enough to be considered a major component of the course (well, maybe the Chemistry), but enough to put some people off doing the courses because they knew it'd be the bane of their lives.

Ditto at university - regardless of how well we did in our modules and projects and so forth, if we didn't get respectable grades in the compulsory IT and maths stuff that we had to go through in tutorials, it was an automatic fail. That kind of maths was hard for many of us, because it required actual logical thinking (hah!). The most memorable one was the first question we got - something like 'if the nucleic acids weigh these different, and these are the proportions of them in a particular string of DNA, and you want liver cells, and there are this many liver cells in the average human, how many cadavers will you need to get this many repeats of this particular string of DNA which is so many thousand bases long?'

I spent more than two hours on that, with my lab partner, and then the postgrad took pity on us and walked us through it. My brain still hurts to think about it.

And yet, I took a job calculating all the changes in pay for all the staff at the previous Trust I worked for, including working out percentage increases and pro rata amounts for part time staff and so forth. And my current job requires me to do lots of counting and working out percentage coverages of vaccinations. And I've just been encouraged to bone up on my stats knowledge again.

So I'm still using maths. The kinds of maths I need for my job/previous jobs doesn't faze me. I don't come into work every day dreading having to do some more maths.

But I also don't have the appreciation of it that I wish I did, I am only able to glimpse fleetingly the beauty and logic of the more complex stuff. But at the same time I refuse to worry too much about it because otherwise I go cross-eyed for a while (e.g. when aegidian tried to explain the concept of imaginary numbers going off at 90^o to the 'regular' number line), and there are so many other ways of looking at life, the universe and everything.

So I would've answered 'no' to all of the options in the last question :-)

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

It's interesting to see how people answer these questions because different people have such a different perspective of what mathematics is. As best I can tell, everything you've described above (except maybe a bit of stats), I would regard as 'arithmetic' and therefore barely mathematics at all but your perspective would be, I suspect, much more 'normal' than mine. (see kalypso_v's comment. I did 'A' level chemistry (well four terms of it, I eventually dropped it to concentrate on a really nasty conditional offer from Cambridge) and I would have said that no maths was involved at all. But then I was doing double maths 'A' and 'S' levels.

One of the reasons I asked the questions that I did was a not very well formulated idea that there is a point at which 'real' maths kick in and at that point some people experience a kind of philosophical/aesthetic breakthrough but that others, equally able, don't. It's not easy to express. It gets a bit like trying to explain colour to a blind person.

[adjectivegail]

I agree with you about the arithmetic vs mathematics thing, just I am pretty much entirely ignorant of the latter so I tend to conflate the two.

I don't think I'm ever going to get to the 'real maths' point, and quite frankly I think I'm happier this way, but your comment here:
...there is a point at which 'real' maths kick in and at that point some people experience a kind of philosophical/aesthetic breakthrough but that others, equally able, don't.
reminded me of the shift between A-level biology and my Microbiology course at uni. There were certain things that we learned in A-level biology, patterns of growth and interactions between systems and things, which were then echoed in things I learned about on the microscopic scale. Patterns of growth and things that don't really apply when you're talking about one bacterium, but that suddenly appear when you've a whole colony of them, and symbiotic relationships between bacteria and their hosts, and so forth. (and of course I now have no examples for this because I've forgotten everything!)

I'm fairly sure that a mathematician could explain the maths behind all of that to me, but frankly I don't really care. It was beautiful and I was awed and loved the fact that I was able to study it.

(posted in a hurry coz I'm supposed to be working so apologies if it's incoherent!)