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

[lnr]

I loved maths all the way through school, it all just made sense, and my only bad point was occasionally not showing "enough" working because some steps were just so intuitively obvious for me I hadn't realised I needed to mention them. I always knew I wanted to go and study it at university, and it wasn't hard to get two A grades at A-level.

And then I went to university and eventually got a BA in Maths (yeah, Oxford's weird) but that was through 4 years of hell, failing finals first time round and passing them the second on the basis of 4/9 of the papers and a doctor's note. There was stuff in there I still loved and that made me think maths is just neat, but sitting finals papers without the foundations necessary to have a hope in hell of being able to answer the questions? Nightmare.

So now I run away from maths, it scares me because I know I should be able to do it and I hate the fact I can't any more. But just a bit of me still finds it really cool.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I have a BA in Maths too!

I noticed through my university career that many, many people hit the wall at different points. We lost a third of the honours class at the end of the first year (Durham was good about letting people transfer to other courses) and another chunk at the end of the second year. I also noticed that a goodly proportion of even the good mathematicians never got their heads around probability theory or any of its derivatives.

[lnr]

It was partly the wall, partly laziness, partly not being used to not having someone to actually push me, and partly life being shit and serious depression. And with the second year stuff not being examined until finals, but being necessary as a foundation to the third year, it's possible to get yourself in a right pickle.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

many people hit the wall at different points

I managed to get a grade C at A-level, but really floundered at first year university accessory maths.

I'm in an odd category that doesn't really fit into your questionnaire, so I've had to fudge the answers there a bit. Basically I was OK at arithmetic at primary school, though was much better at English. But I really really couldn't do mental arithmetic, despite regular weekly tests. (Don't get me started on the "Kids these days can't do mental arithmetic. They should have regular tests for practice.") I could do what we called "problems" well though. I could work out what I needed to calculate, but usually made a mistake doing the calculation-- which is why I love spreadsheets!

In secondary school, we had a wonderful teacher. We had a maths club that I joined and I could see the fascination of the subject. I just couldn't do it! I was just about groping my way to some sort of understanding of one topic at the point where we were moving on to the next. Despite this, because I chose science A-levels, I took A-level maths. I obtained a grade E at first attempt, C after another year of studying, which was done mostly on my own because our Maths teacher had chosen the brand new maths-with-statistics option and Bury Tech, where I went to resit A-levels, was doing pure and applied maths. I opted to stick with stats, which I liked because I could see a purpose to it. Of course this was BC (Before Computers) or even calculators, so the syllabus will be quite different now.

Then, at university, I somehow scraped through the first year accessory course, but knew there was absolutely no way of going further.

However... I still find maths fascinating as a spectator sport. I've ended up married to a mathematician (A chartered mathematician, no less!) who, when I first met him, couldn't even rearrange equations and used to ask me to do it for him. G came to maths late, in his 30s, and did an OU degree, then a masters and now has almost finished a Ph.D. which is mostly maths, with computer modelling and hydrology and meteorology.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

I went to university and eventually got a BA in Maths (yeah, Oxford's weird)

But a mathematician friend at Oxford assured me that, at degree level, mathematics is an art, not a science.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

At Oxford, even engineering is an art.

[lnr]

It's true that Maths is somewhere inbetween Arts and Science and is neither fish nor fowl, although you can choose options that tailor it closer to one or the other.

But *everything* at Oxford gets you a BA to start with. And in fact my degree is technically in "Mathematical sciences".