Does anyone else find math boring?

My current strategy for self-educating in math is to learn mental math techniques so that I can remove the causes of why I hate math: the tediousness of the calculations and the frustrations from making calculation errors.

I rarely make logic errors in math, but I often get bogged down and make mistakes with the actual calculations. If I can remove such mistakes by learning mental math techniques, I believe that it will make it nearly as easy as reading a book to learn higher math.

I find the logic of math to be fun and challenging. For example, I recently figured out the logic of why the algorithm for finding square roots works. I have wondered about this ever since I first encountered the algorithm, but I was neither logically nor algebraically sophisticated enough to figure it out until recently when I again turned my attention to it. It is very satisfying to understand math logically as opposed mindlessly following a technique, which I cannot trust or creatively expand upon.

As to motivation, I have specific desires and goals that I want to meet and I will need a deep education in many higher maths and physics and computer programming and a martial level of physical training to reach my goals as a professional gambler ("dice-setting" in craps requires deep physical skill, and adapting to custom-made unique craps tables in casinos requires a deep understanding of the classical physics, and that is only one game that I want to master). Thus, my motivation is sustained and directed and practical.

I am not even sure if I hate math anymore.

Very Respectfully,
Ray Donald Pratt

 

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There is a point to the objections here, though.

Take the way calculus is taught to future doctors. Trigonometry is useful, in its patterns of thought etc, and a basic understanding of logarithms is almost essential for research medicine, but trig substitution as a technique for evaluating integrals?

And not only is that shoved at them ( instead of more attention to stability and phase and behaviors of systems of differential equations, for example), but it's fairly difficult and they have to get good grades on the exams.

That's a waste of everyone's time.

 

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That's exactly what I was thinking. Thanks for wording it so perfectly.

Math has been, and still is my favorite subject (maybe a tie with physics). I think it is very clear that it's the most important subject by a long shot. People who say they hate math are either lazy or misinformed, in my opinion.

 

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I was "poor" at Math in high school. It wasn't 'til I got to Uni that I found out about "mathematical beauty". This could have been because, instead of a Math teacher, we got an android who creaked and whined a lot. Consequently my geometry lessons were largely spent drawing quite different things. First year calculus was actually not so hard for me, for some reason. I still remember when I got Laplace transforms. We had been studying the complex plane and the behaviours of reactive components in networks and how such can be reduced to an algebraic. Then the bulb came on, and I saw how the transform behaves, in a complex plane like a sort of magic view, where you get a much simpler image which is then easier to “manipulate”. Then the transform inverts the view again and you've got your answer in the “real” world. Amazing. Well that's sort of how I remember it.

 

Math is only boring when you're forced to learn it ina rigid way.

As a 3 month old babe, I learned commutative ring theory. That's how I came across arithmetic.

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Thats a pretty good example JamesR, although I am yet to evaluate the programme D. It seems that more information would be required, specifically about the cancer rate in the general population, wouldn't it?

The example very simplistically shows that even though it does not require complicated mathematical knowledge, it still probably needs some amount of mathematical experience just to know what to do.

 

Starting with the basics, right?

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This problem reminds me of one I heard in probability and statistics class, which goes something like this:

1 in 10,000 members of a population are infected with disease X. The standard test for this disease has a 99.9% chance of detecting X in an infected individual, and a 0.1% chance of returning a false positive result for a healthy individual. Joe's test for X returned a positive result. What is the probability that Joe is infected with X?

I was told by my prob&stat professor that 90% of Harvard medical school students get problems like this one wrong.

 

1.04?

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The following is an actual question given on a University of Washington chemistry midterm. The answer was so "profound"
that the professor shared it with colleagues, which is why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well.

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law, (gas cools off when it expands and heats up when it is compressed) or some variant. One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing with time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Some of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell.

Since there are more than one of these religions, and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell.

With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.

Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell; because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. Of course, if Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over. So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Ms. Teresa Banyan during my Freshman year--"...that it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you."--and take into account the fact that I still have not succeeded in having sexual relations with her, then #2 cannot be true; and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and will not freeze.

THE STUDENT RECEIVED THE ONLY "A" GIVEN

 

maths is beautiful and sacred...

too bad i hated it at school

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IT MUST BE TAUGHT PROPERLY! which it is not in our modern system.. it is simply introduced to young minds who most likely find it workable yet incredibly alien. and it is alien i suppose.. it occurs everywhere! like i said before it is sacred.

i really think maths should be taught with its history! once you understand who pythagoras is and why there is a theorem named after him that your scribbling into your book you gain a real appreciation for it and a desire to explore maths further.

we need to learn the origins of modern mathematics to appreciate its real value. instead of just seeing numbers numbers numbers numbers numbers......

 

Fraggle Rocker,

No, I do that kind of stuff all the time and don't get blank stares. The clerk simply enters the amount you give him/her in the cash register and it automatically tells them the correct change. How can you tell if the clerk knows beforehand that a quarter is due back or not? They are required to enter your exact money into the cash register/terminal before handing you your change.

Again, you are just making up stuff. I doubt few elementary school students don't know 8 x 9 = 72. And no, if you bought ten cans of paint at ten dollars each, your bill would not be a hundred dollars. Few people forget about sales tax.

 

Sorry if I spoil it for anyone, but I want to know if I beat them Harvard snobs

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So the test gives a false positive every 1,000 tests made on uninfected people? In 10,000 people, that means there will be 10 false positives and very likely a single true positive? That would give about a 9.1% probability of an actual infection, after the test was made.

 

I don't think most places over here require the clerk to enter the amount of money given to the registry, but they can do so for convenience. In the case described, I usually get my extra change right back, and they give me change for the single larger bill, just to avoid thinking about what they would need to give me back for the extra change I've offered. They simply count up from the cost of my purchases to the money given.

The question doesn't seem to be of actually knowing how to calculate, but the unwillingness to do so even in very primitive cases. Just hearing "eight times nine" seems to bring an empty glare on some people, although if insisted more, they could probably get the correct answer without problems. A lot of people have convinced themselves that they don't need to and can't use math in everyday life, and that blocks away all chances of actually thinking about the problem.

That is not, of course, a generalization I can make from the top of my head, but it sure seems that way to me.

 

All I have seen do require the clerk to enter the amount received. The clerk also has to select check, credit card, debit card or cash when entering the payment. The initial amount that pops up is the charge, then the clerk has to balance that charge with payment received. Do all of you pay so little attention when paying for purchases?

 

Another matter:

neither the kind of insight and expansion of thinking ability supposedly inculcated by mathematical education

nor the entrenchment of a body of techniques and skills and simple knowledge of mathematical entities along the way, as examples and so forth,

are inevitable during successful - even exemplary - completion of a course of ordinary school mathematics.

A sufficiently clever student can get by with visual pattern recognition and a good short term cram memory. Little or no actual mathematics need actually be learned.

It's kind of like how illiterates can fake it through pretty advanced education, only much more common and without any aura of inadequacy. And with the current emphasis on test teaching in the US, I suspect it's a permanent feature of the intellectual landscape.

 

I completely agree that the way math is taught must be changed. Numbers and formulas scribbled on a chalkboard with students memorizing stuff is not the way to go. I had a high school calculus teacher who really made you understand conceptually what you were doing, even when a simple formula could be used. Now I was lucky that he used computer graphics and simulations to show some of the higher dimensional concepts like double and triple integrals, but the point is that actually understanding what you are doing instead of applying a formula makes math interesting.

I think that a fundamental way to solve this problem is to put a great focus on deriving theorems and formulas with students. Instead of giving formulas to students to memorize, students should come to understand the concepts and axioms and subsequently derive the formulas form those. It always amazes me to see students struggling to memorize a bunch of formulas when if they just knew the concepts it would all be clear.

Simple example: the trig identities.
sin^2+cos^2=1
1-sin^2=cos^2
1-cos^2=sin^2
tan^2+1=sec^2
sec^2-1=tan^2
cot^2+1=csc^2
cot^2=csc^2-1

Instead of memorizing these, just remember the first one and the rest can be derived. Even the first one does not need to be memorized, since if a student conceptually knows the unit circle, then he knows that sin^2+cos^2=1, since sin and cos are x and y so x^2+y^2=1 which is the equation of a circle with radius 1.

if more focus is put on math concepts and derivation of formulas then i think students would like it more and find it less tedious.

 

Even better, just know that for a right triangle... x^2 + y^2 = r^2. Multiply both sides by 1/r^2 and you have (x/r)^2 + (y/r)^2 = 1... and clearly x/r = cos (theta) by definition... similar for sin(theta).