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

[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!)