Maths

[Bigfella]

I always enjoyed English lessons at school.  Managed to get my Higher (also known as A levels).  Didn't do quite as well with maths.  In primary there was no real problem - it would sometimes take a while to grasp a new concept, but once it clicked I'd race through all the sums easily.  In high school, for one reason and another I fell behind and ended up in the remedial class.  Have to admit, I'm somewhat ashamed at being a fully grown man with no idea what trigonometry is.  I know basic arithmetic and am comfortable with percentages, decimals and fractions.  Where should I venture next? Algebra?  Go on, try your hand at being a tutor.

[bgmnts]

Me + maths = shit.

[Clatty McCutcheon]

Have to admit, I'm somewhat ashamed at being a fully grown man with no idea what trigonometry is.  I know basic arithmetic and am comfortable with percentages, decimals and fractions.  Where should I venture next? Algebra?  Go on, try your hand at being a tutor.

At one time maths and arithmetic were separate subjects in high school (in Scotland anyway). Don't know when that ended - sometime in the late 70s/early 80s possibly - long before my time at school. I don't really see that much point, for most people, of doing much more than just arithmetic. Maths should really just be for people who want to go into science or engineering. The way the Highers choices were organised in the 90s, I had no choice but to pick maths, and I just about managed to scrape through. The Standard Grade maths was OK - found it generally fine, but the Higher stuff was just too abstract. I mean, what the fuck is a vector?

[ZoyzaSorris]

Maths is great. The power of pure logic. I'm sure what I consider proper maths and say pancreas does are poles apart, but love me a bit. Trigonometry (in fact most more advanced maths) always seemed to be taught in the most impenetrable way in school but it makes a lot of sense once you start trying to navigate any kind of space and working out distances and angles and shit. Animated diagrams showing connection between circles, sine waves, cosine waves etc help get the concept in mind a lot. Vector maths is a cool digression in that sort of direction too. I understood quite a bit for a while but feel like a lot of it has gone.   

[ZoyzaSorris]

At one time maths and arithmetic were separate subjects in high school (in Scotland anyway) - don't know when that ended - sometime in the late 70s/early 80s possibly - long before my time at school. I don't really that much point, for most people, of doing much more than just arithmetic. Maths should really just be for people who want to go into science or engineering. The way the Highers choices were organised in the 90s, I had no choice but to pick maths, and I just about managed to scrape through. The Standard Grade maths was OK - found it generally fine, but the Higher stuff was just too abstract. I mean, what the fuck is a vector?

Ha. Snap. Vectors are a really great way of exploring multi-dimensional space. They actually make a lot of sense explained the right way (ie not the way they probably do it in school).

[Ferris]

Had some dilbert trying to tell me the (sum of all integers = -1/12) the other day.

I said that's bollocks and he got all defensive about it. State of some people.

[Bigfella]

Ha. Snap. Vectors are a really great way of exploring multi-dimensional space. They actually make a lot of sense explained the right way (ie not the way they probably do it in school).

I know what vector graphics are - 'Elite' on the Spectrum.  I would have to remind myself about mass, surface areas and diameters.  Walk before running!

[eagle_bearer]

Has anyone ever put 58008 in a calculator and turned it upside down?

[jamiefairlie]

Learning about basic logic is very helpful for life

[Johnny Foreigner]

I have dyscalculia. I have always mixed up numbers, never been able to memorise times-tables, need a calculator for the simplest multiplications and divisions. I can never trust my own brain to get a mathematical calculation right, and often do not even know how to go about it in the first place. This, needless to say, irrevocably thwarted my quondam aspirations of becoming a professional astronomer.

I speak four languages fluently and correctly, and can understand several more. I also never needed a script when acting as a prompter, because I just knew the whole play by rote. Whenever I have taken an intelligence test, the result came out as far below average on logical reasoning, and far above average on verbal intelligence.

[Clatty McCutcheon]

^^

I think for a lot of people (myself included) maths is just impenetrable, though.

I can pick up languages and written word-related stuff quite readily but just can't really seem to make sense (not that I've tried since leaving school almost 25 years ago) of what mathematical stuff means, or even what it is.

[Johnny Foreigner]

Oddly, trigonometry is very transparent to me. It's always the same thing: you have a triangle and the sum of its angles can never exceed 360°. If you know one of the angles, working your way to the other two is quite easy, bearing Pythagoras in mind. That was one of the few things I could do.

...wait. It's 180 degrees, isn't it?

[ProvanFan]

I was good at exams, so it looked like I was a bit of a maths buff up to advanced higher level, but I never really felt like one. It was a house of cards that came tumbling down in my poorly chosen first attempt at uni. Certainly never enjoyed it and don't lament forgetting most of it. But I do like angular guitar and the film Pi.

[TrenterPercenter]

Not directed at anyone in this thread but is there anything more typically British than talking about maths.

"I am terrible at maths/I am good maths"

I'm alright at maths not terrible and not good; it's just numbers innit; very few circumstance anyone will ever need to do hard maths without the aid of a calculator which are on everyones phone now.  Bit of basic multiplication, addition and subtraction is about it in any practical real world sense.

[ProvanFan]

And being a contestant on Numberwang.

[Blumf]

I think a lot of the issues people have with school maths is the cack-handed way it races towards calculus (but not actually reaching it unless you do whatever A-levels are now), without really giving you the insights needed to appreciate it. Pushing through quadratics and all that shit. Not much use to most people, and not really insightful until much further along the road if you're going full on in the world of maths. It ends up being drudge work.



One of my favourite puzzles, that avoids any high-falutin algebra and that:

You'll know about square numbers, pretty easy you make a square with sides of you number and count the dots.

So, 3 squared is:

***
***
***

=9 dots

But you can also have triangle numbers, where the side and base have the same number of dots.

So 3 triangled is:

*
**
***

=6 dots

5 triangled

*
**
***
****
*****

=15 dots

Now, the puzzle:

Figure out how 8 equal triangle numbers plus 1 will always form a square.

For example, 1 triangled is a single dot *, 8 of them, plus 1 dot *:

*********

Which is 9 dots in total, which as we saw above can be arranged as 3 squared:

***
***
***

Can we do that with any triangle number? If so, how?

The solution can be figured out entirely visually. No arithmetic or trig, or any of that nonsense needed, just the ability to count.

Put the effort in, it's really nice when it clicks and you figure it out.

[Poobum]

Maths for me is like trying to hold onto soapy marbles with greased up hands.

[Ominous Dave]

Well I might as well put this here I suppose:

https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

[shiftwork2]

It's a language to describe interesting things.  Pulls on the old loaf like no other A Level.

Old loaf means your brain, not your button mush.

[Poirots BigGarlickyCorpse]

I studied Higher Level Maths all through secondary school and finished out with a C2 in the Leaving. While studying for my degree I had to take non-chemistry electives to make up my total credits and since I was fed up of physics, maths it was. I studied calculus, algebra and imaginary numbers.

The amount of maths that leaks out of my brain and into the memory hole every year is frightening.

[jamiefairlie]

^^

I think for a lot of people (myself included) maths is just impenetrable, though.

I can pick up languages and written word-related stuff quite readily but just can't really seem to make sense (not that I've tried since leaving school almost 25 years ago) of what mathematical stuff means, or even what it is.

That's the problem right there. People looking for it to 'mean' something. It's just a series of tools you apply to certain problems and you just need to know what rule to apply and the mechanism used, which is just practice and practice and practice. I excelled at Maths to second year at Uni (as part of my Comp Sci degree), straight 'A's all the way, and I can honestly say I had no clue what it actually meant in the real world, all I knew was it's this kind of problem and I'd hammered away at millions of examples of doing that type of problem.

[jamiefairlie]

My favourite Maths problem (probability actually) is the utterly mindbending Monty Hall one.

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors:

Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats.

You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat.

He then says to you, "Do you want to switch to door No. 2 or stick with door 1?"

Is it to your advantage to switch your choice or stick?

[Ferris]

Switch, gives me 2x the chance of getting it right.

It's easiest to think of the example with 10,000 doors. You pick one at random (with basically fuck all chance of getting it right), then the other person opens every other door except this specific one (no reason) and says you wanna stick with the one you picked (chances of being right 1/10,000) or the door that's left (9999/10,000)?

[flotemysost]

I have dyscalculia. I have always mixed up numbers, never been able to memorise times-tables, need a calculator for the simplest multiplications and divisions. I can never trust my own brain to get a mathematical calculation right, and often do not even know how to go about it in the first place. This, needless to say, irrevocably thwarted my quondam aspirations of becoming a professional astronomer.

I don't know about dyscalculia (I've heard of it but not sure what the exact criteria is), but the above pretty much summarises my experience too. Trying to mentally navigate even the most basic sums (as you say, figuring out how to do it in the first place, let alone actually doing it) can get quite upsetting and frustrating. Simply not a clue how people manage to hold these vast, completely abstract figures and equations in their head, I need something to latch it onto.

For as long as I can remember, like since really early childhood when I was first taught to count, I've always unthinkingly assigned personalities/identities to numbers: so one is an adult male, two is an adult female, three is a female child, and so on, Ridiculous I know, but it makes the whole idea of numbers slightly easier to fathom. Still failed my Maths GCSE (eventually re-sat it and scraped a pass).

My favourite Maths problem (probability actually) is the utterly mindbending Monty Hall one.

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors:

Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats.

You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat.

He then says to you, "Do you want to switch to door No. 2 or stick with door 1?"

Is it to your advantage to switch your choice or stick?

Massive assumption there. What if I want the goat?

[ProvanFan]

one is an adult male

two is an adult female

[JesusAndYourBush]

Maths teacher in Middle school was awful.  Miss B..., pure distilled evil.  She'd scream at you if you got something wrong but never explain why you got it wrong so you'd carry on making the same mistakes.  Once she crossed out a whole page of my maths book with her red pen with so much force the it ripped through the next dozen pages.

High school wasn't much better.  Part way through the year the teacher told us to get our log tables out.  What fucking log tables? I'd never been told to get any log tables.  Everyone else had these little slim pamphlet things called 'SMP tables' or something, think it had a red cover.  I can't even work out a theory on what happened there, but I don't think I'd missed the lesson where we were told we should get them.  For the rest of the year on the small number of occasions we actually needed them to look something up I just borrowed someone's, except I must have missed the lessons where we were taught just what the fuck trigonometry was and how to do it, so I totally floundered that part of maths.  Still can't work out what the fuck happened there.  The best theory I can come up with is that in moving from one year to the next they put me in the wrong maths set.  Perhaps I was judged clever enough to move up a set, except in the lower set I'd not been taught something the people in the higher set would have already known.  A kind of 'Peter Principle'.

[Fr.Bigley]

Has anyone ever put 58008 in a calculator and turned it upside down?

You twat, I did that and now my calculator screen is broken. You know how much a mac costs!!

[chveik]

i've had a couple of nasty teachers. you had to do well if you didn't want to get belittled in front of everyone which hardly gives you a meaningful interest in the discipline. under different circumstances i might have enjoyed it but it's a bit late now, although i struggled so much with proofs that it probably wouldn't have amounted to anything

[kalowski]

Oddly, trigonometry is very transparent to me. It's always the same thing: you have a triangle and the sum of its angles can never exceed 360°. If you know one of the angles, working your way to the other two is quite easy, bearing Pythagoras in mind. That was one of the few things I could do.

...wait. It's 180 degrees, isn't it?

Don't know if you can ever get to 360° but non-Euclidean geometry allows for triangles whose angles sum to more (or less) than 180°. Draw a triangle on the surface of a sphere.

[dex]

Me + maths = shit.

Slipknot consider re-write etc.