Time for a poll

[chickenfeet2003]

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 math

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]

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]

many people hit the wall at different pointsI managed to get a grade C at A-level, but really floundered at first year university accessory maths

[kalypso_v]

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]

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".