Despite being a mathlete in high school, I totally whiffed on it in college. I did struggle with high school calculus, but I placed into Calc II in college, so in my infinite wisdom, I decided to take it my freshman year because I needed math and science credits. Holy shit - it was so difficult I’ve blacked it all out except for one flash memory of just sitting there one day being clueless. I managed a B-, but that was because it was graded on a curve. Think I would’ve had a D otherwise.
2 Likes
I literally lettered in math and swimming in high school.
2 Likes
Only the ones that aren’t imaginary
Yeah. I was similar. Was on the math team in middle school but ended up falling apart once Calculus became a thing in my life. I remember almost nothing from the math classes I took in college. Only thing is that I had a panic attack during a calculus exam and scored above the class average despite it. I remember nothing else. Got low Bs/high Cs in college math probably partly due to a curve.
2 Likes
I think everyone has the point in learning math where they stop comprehending why they’re doing something and that’s where their progress ends.
I was always mathematically inclined, got through Calculuses, Differential Equations, and Linear Algebra with a few stumbling blocks in Diff. Eq. Then I got to some multivariable statistics class and that was very obvious that it was the end of my upper level math journey.
I think the office hours for that class were just as well attended as the regular class with everybody taking it admitting we had no idea what was going on.
1 Like
I like Russell’s attempt to derive arithmetic from pure logical principles. The only janky part is that you have to assume the existences of an infinite number of objects for the proofs to work out.
further reading: Russell’s reduction of mathematics to logic
2 Likes
There was once a time I had to solve so many quadratic equations that weren’t clean for some engineering class that I would just go straight to the formula that had long ago been burned into my memory. Then I worked in the tutoring center for a semester and helped some pre-calc kid find the roots of x^2 + 7x + 10 or something by diving in and going through all the steps and I was amazed at the nice round numbers that came out. Fortunately I realized pretty quickly that I had taken the wrong approach cause he had a worksheet with like 20 of them to solve, so I was like sorry, please forget all that and just look at the problems.
1 Like
Probably, depending on your major, whether you had any AP-type credits from your HS days, and what we’re defining as math. I took a ton of AP classes in hs, so the only math adjacent stuff I had to take in college were a few econ classes, and the math in those wasn’t that sophisticated.
[I also took an “accounting for lawyers” class in law school that mostly just taught me why lawyers shouldn’t be trusted to detect financial fraud]
1 Like
The only math I “had” to take in college was statistics to get into the undergrad business school. As I mentioned, I placed into Calc II, so I think I already had some math/science credits, but I could have just taken a science class, instead. I was stupid.
I mean, shit, my freshman year I also took “Philosophy of Science” because I was an idealist and it sounded interesting. Like Calc, I had no idea what was happening. I also had a Monday through Friday Spanish class at 9:00am.
I wised up after my first year. One class I took in my final semester was “History of the American Circus.”
2 Likes
I had to take a statistics course for my masters in journalism, but they let me take it in the Education department, where the focus was on direct application to enhancing the experience of your audience. Turned out to be exceptionally relevant to my career in publishing and formed the backbone of my research design for my thesis: Book DNA: validating how successful mystery literature is constructed
Sure helped that I could use SPSS to run all of the numbers 
2 Likes
Mine was the same but Math Physics was my wall. Tensors and shit. It didn’t help that my teacher sucked.
If I can’t visualize it I’m lost.
I completed enough math classes in college to end up with a minor but I don’t think I couldn’t solve a quadratic formula problem if my life depended on it.
I also took no math growing up and then figured it all out in college. I think my highest math class in high school was some basic algebra shit in 10th grade.
1 Like
This is normally an upper division class. Not the place to start in philosophy, lol.
I won the math portion of the county academic pentathlon in the C-student group in 8th grade and placed in the top 5 in high school. Passed AP calc (AB) with a 4, but then took college calc with a bad teacher (new prof from China with a heavy accent) and a bad book, put in limited effort and barely scrapped by. My worst college grades were my first quarter.
I feel like I had a pretty good feel for math but never a strong interest. I took stats for social science in college and got an A, but I think the most complex thing we did was double t tests, and that was like a year or two before significant emphasis on using statistics programs. I did well on GRE quantitative section (like 95%), but its mostly just SAT algebra and, I believe, was regarded as easier than the SAT.
In any event, I considered philosophy more significant than math.
Went back to uni after 20 years of no maths. Engineering with some pretty heavy maths.
Conclusions.
-
It comes back to you more easily the second time. Even if you’ve forgotten it.
-
(Almost) Any maths can be learned if you work hard at it. I’m sure plenty of you reached points where what you were doing stopped working. I think that’s likely the failure point for your learning methods rather than you end point as a mathematician.
2 Likes
Very curious:
What was your career before going back to college? What prompted you to make a switch like that? Overall are you happy you did it?
I’m currently in a spot where I’m a trader, I make really good money but I’d say most days I find my work repetitive and uninspiring. I’ve been thinking about a later in life career switch to something like Engineering or Public Policy (got an undergrad degree in Math) but I have no idea what that process would look like.
Weird, I had a similar situation going into undergrad but a much better experience. Probably because my only exceptional teacher in HS was my Calculus teacher. I got a 5 on the AP test and had Calc II first semester in college (bio major), and it was almost like a refresher course, a breeze. Of course now I have forgotten every single thing from the course except the hot Hawaiian Tracy who always sat by me and I was a fool not to pursue. In the wink of a young girl’s eye – Jersey Jeans Guy
I did philosophy and politics at uni for undergraduate. I’ve been running large contact centres for most of my career since then.
For the last 5 years I’ve been working at an energy company (still doing contact centres). I’m studying a masters of energy which is pretty interdisciplinary, with economics, politics, finance, etc, but also has some serious engineering. Electrical, thermodynamics, etc.
The idea is either to equip me for the bigger jobs at my company, or a sideways move into energy projects and generation management. Will see how it goes.
Edit. Studying part time. If that wasnt obvious
What’s a contact center?
Ezra Klein’s recent conversation about how liberal reliance on process and procedural requirements actually stymies necessary progress is pretty good.
1 Like
It’s a broader term for call centre.
1 Like