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

[a_d_medievalist]

I'm in a quandary about maths. I've always been crap at them. Part of this was that, as a child I went from a school system where we were doing "new Math" (the 4th-grade book had sets on the cover, and we were taught all about sets and different mathematical properties ...) to a school system where we were expected to have learned all the traditional stuff. Part of it was that I spent most of the time I could get away with it in the back of the room reading while the teacher was talking (I failed math one half-term, because I'd not done any homework -- I still passed all the tests). But I think most of it was that no one ever explained things to me in a way that I understood the point OR what I was trying to do. I found geometry easier than algebra, because I could 'see' it -- and even then, I had problems with the formulae.

Oddly, when I was in grad school, I realized one day (when waitressing and dividing a very complex multi-party check) that I was actually doing algebra. I re-learned a lot of basic arithmetic then as well

[chickenfeet2003]

I guess I was pretty lucky with teachers though to be honest, beyond learning to read and write, I'm not convinced I learned anything much at elementary school. I can certainly remember quite precisely the point at which I grasped that there was something more to mathematics than puzzle solving (though I was damn good at that - I scored 100% on both the Common Entrance maths papers). It would have been in my first year in the Upper School (ie I'd just turned 13). I got my hands on a copy of Edwin Abbott's Flatland and I was hooked. I wonder how many budding mathematicians have been similarly snared by that slim but venerable volume.

[knirirr]

Answers:

1. I wish I could understand it, but I'm too thick.
   
2. Barely passed A-level.
   
3. I wish I could understand it, but I'm too thick or a pox on statistics, it's some sort of voodoo.
   

[livredor]

Definitely numerate, enough to assume you mean mathematics rather than arithmetic, enough to be able to follow mathematical arguments in scientific contexts. But by the standards of mathematicians I'm clearly not one. If you prefer it in terms of qualifications, I took the double A Level and 4 terms' worth of "maths for chemists" at uni. (Biologists with double A Level took chemists' maths, chemists with double A level took physicists' maths...) I expect it's about equivalent to the first 2 weeks of an actual maths degree, though, so I can't exactly call it a degree with significant maths.

I like maths, but on the same level I find lots of other topics interesting to read about. I'm not passionate about it, and I'm glad I realized this before I embarked on a maths degree. The thing is, you need to know quite a lot of maths to even be interested in the latest developments, and I do have at least that much background.

[sabotabby]

I'm not sure what the equivalents of A- or O-level are in Canada, but you're required to take high school math up until tenth grade. I did it up to OAC (grade 13) even though it was among my weakest subjects, mostly because I didn't want to be one of those Girls Who Are No Good At Math. I worked insanely hard and did respectably. The only math class in which I did wonderfully was a trial class on fractals and chaos theory.