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[miss_padfoot]

What is with mathophobia? Nobody ever thinks it's okay to be illiterate, but everyone is so quick to excuse innumeracy. If I had a nickel for every time I have heard someone who considers him- or herself intelligent say, "I'm more of an English-humanities person," as an excuse for not asking whether a particular number made sense, I'd have a bit of

Comments

[faelegacy]

But I'm more of an English-humanities person!

/I'm not.
//But I wanted to give you a nickel.
///Five cents closer to a million...

:)

[miss_padfoot]

If you want me to have $1,000,000, you could just give it to me all at once. :D That would be appreciated. Or you could just give me a nickel.

Also, I love the way the resident crossword nuts (i.e. we) self-identify as science people. WTF is up with that? Maybe if we were English-humanities people we'd be able to do Thursday puzzles.

I doubt it, though.

[miss_padfoot]

Ooh, those are lovely. Especially the first one.

Thanks! *borrows*

[fzun]

You know, I never thought of that. Why is it not ok for people to be illiterate or inarticulate but it's ok for a person to be not so good in math?

Hm. Now you got me thinking. And it's 6:15am so I'm not happy XD

[miss_padfoot]

Heh. I know what you mean about the "It is obvious" thing - the most clear reference to it that I've seen was as a solution to a tricky differential equation thingy on a physics problem in high school. They said it should be obvious that the answer would take the form e^(-px)+C or something. My class had a good time trying to figure out why that was obvious (we never really did).

The next best one was in a biology book, when Richard Dawkins was quoting some biologist who had once said that the rate of change in a particular trait was proportional to the amount of change that had already happened. Or something. Luckily, Dawkins said, "Well, this may seem obvious to [guy he was quoting] but not all of us think it's so obvious, so let me explain..." and then spent about ten pages bringing us through the thought process that had seemed "obvious" to this guy he was quoting. He managed to do it without talking down to the readers, too.

...I love Richard Dawkins so, so much. You'll get used to me talking about him.

[miss_padfoot]

Actually, it does make some sort of sense. The important part was "the function is equal to its derivative". The rest... well, it sort of flowed. :) And you're right - it wasn't obvious to me. I think we eventually got to the answer by solving the differential equation, but the people writing the thing sort of assumed we could skip about 8 steps and, being lowly high school physics students, we couldn't.

It's so nice having a (fellow) math and physics nerd on my friends list, especially when said nerd knows much more about math and physics than me. Will you mind if I ask you for help in my physics class next semester? Don't worry, I promise to do it as little as possible, but if I get desperate and for some reason none of the campus tutors are available and my father can only be reached by phone (which is supremely unhelpful with equations that need to be written down)... well. Yeah.

[sapphires13]

I'm good at math, I just HATE HATE HATE HATE it, with a side of HATE.

I think maybe it has to do with how reading and writing and stuff are more creative and fun, and math just seems so tedious.

I love science though (just not the parts that have math all attached to them).