this was supposed to appear under the review section, and the statistics. I took a statistics course in college and almost died.

cuz evidently YOU SURVIVED! ... LOL

what IS the deal with folks who can not stomach the slightest bit of math?  -- i personally wouldn't call that MATH, but that's another story

you all know it has NOTHING to do with intelligence. i know people of super-human brain power that couldn't fathom the simplest mathematical formula (y=ax+b) ... yet they can perform brain surgery or write the most ingeniously crafted poetry, etc.

i'm convinced it's kinda like one's propensity for picking up new languages, almost. either you're good at it or you're not. some people can master 5 or 6 languages with ease. some (on this board) struggle with just good old English (the easiest)!  LOL


and if that last comment is not gonna get me into trouble, how about this one:

what's the deal with WOMEN and mathophobia???  

LOL

[putting on my flak-jacket]






-- Modified on 7/16/2003 5:43:52 PM

I know this was said tongue in cheek, but...

I seriously doubt that there is a Brain Surgeon out there who deal with a fair amount of math and easily grasp y=ax+b.  If you know one who can't handle that, by all means don't let him operate on you...or is it too late.

Also, I don't think that English is the easiest language by a long shot.

but i doubt if a brain surgeon would stop in the middle of an aneurysm to ponder the "elliptic curve" solution to Fermat's last theorem. btw, for the record, i'm NOT a mathematician ... i'm just making this stuff up as i go along

as for English, i wondered about that as i was writing that tongue-in-cheek joke, whether that was indeed true. what i was mostly going by was the seemingly prevalent phenomenon of English being spoken by most non-English speakers (from the Chinese to the Czech, it seems to be the case, but i could be wrong). it seems to be taught as a second language in most parts of the world. i would love to hear a definitive answer one way or another. still, i suppose Esperanto would have to be "easiest" by then only be design, but perhaps that's why it never caught on! LOL

Sometimes it's the KIND of math.  Even though I had a minor in math with major in comp sci, there was something about statistics that made it really hard to get my brain around.  I finally passed the one required statistics course after taking it twice, the 2nd time with extra study.  I was SO glad to be done with it.

But Barbie herself said it, "Math is hard", iirc.

I took everything from Algebra, Trig, Calculus, and advance Calculus, and was a A, B, student. But statistics kicked my ass.

Sorry to hear about your headace

But, if you take 2 in the morning, I will be right OVER..purrrr


Mel



-- Modified on 7/17/2003 7:57:00 AM

Everybody has different types of intelligence. For a (brainy, poorly written, overly academicized, excessively cloistered in the Social Science assumptions, but nevertheless perhaps) good discussion of this, see Sternberg's book, "Successful Intelligence," in which he identifies Practical, Creative, and Analytical components to intelligence.

I suspect most people who like to say, "Omigoood my brain is fried by all this math" are doing it more for the fun than the truth. If they had a gun to their head, and Al Qaeda told them they either differentiated or died, they'd learn to differentiate probably. Some of us have a "phobia" about it -- and might not be able to find the presence of mind to learn before the gun went off, but still, that's more a personal issue about their mother (or their High School Math Teacher) than about their "real" abilities. I remember plenty of people telling me how bad I was at singing, when I first started taking voice lessons, with statements like "You CAN'T sing" or "Stop it, stop it, you're driving me NUTS!" It's simply an OK thing, to say you're bad at math, or he's bad at singing. Also, I notice that drawing and writing fall into this category. It's not so OK to say someone's bad at, for example, business -- imagine confronting an average shop keeper with, "Hey, your customer base sucks!" as a joke or as a serious statement. We find certain aspects of life to be ridiculable, either in ourselves or in others. I personally try not to do that at all. I believe everyone can learn anything if he really wants to. For example, the people IN my choir were continually supportive, regardless of how bad I was, because they saw me improving and, more important, knew better how to judge potential than your average Joe who was hollering "Stop singing" and slapping his hands over his ears. If he'd been less embarrassed about the whole concept of someone else singing, I think average Joe might have heard that I wasn't really all that bad, but behind his paranoia was a sense that HE didn't know squat about judging good singing from bad, and he needed therefore to boost his own confidence by cutting someone else's down.

For me, statistics was very straightforward -- it is nearly ALL simply applying a formula, and is incredibly useful for poker. On the other hand, calculus (higher level, like differential equations) and other analytics I just didn't keep up with quick enough. I could do every problem on the test, but it would take me a week to do one of them, and only if I had a reference manual with me. Unfortunately, there were usually about six to be done in an hour, on a typical test. It was DiffEQ that differentiated (ahem) the Math majors from the rest of us in college. I dropped, and majored in English.

But I have no regrets about that. I'm glad I got enough credits, bar one, to be a Math major. I got to my personal "limit", and I look back now and realize, that mostly what was holding me back in DiffEQ was interest, not ability. I just got sick of all 'dem symbols. I could appreciate the artistry of it, in a quiet calm moment, but the paranoid hectic speed at which it all had to be forced down my throat sort of had me resisting. I wouldn't have been able to identify myself as "a recalcitrant math student" at the time, no, of course not. I'd have said it was all going too fast for me, the teacher should go slower. But then I'd hustle off to read another 500 pages of Dickens in an hour ... I was INTERESTED in something else.

I think it's important for everyone to remind himself -- and, more to the point in this discussion, HERself -- that most anything can be accomplished with the right attitude. Women have been shutting themselves out of math, and men out of singing, because socially it's always been "OK" to be "bad" at that, in the "Omigoood I'm such a LOzer" sort of socially sanctioned ineptitude that we all recognize too readily. America is bad for encouraging ineptitude ... fight it! By choice I worked out the (very elegant) proof to the Pythagorean Theorem a few weeks ago, just as a pastime. I'd never "done" it back when, or if I had, I didn't remember it. Now I'm impressed by Pythagoras AND by my own creativity and analytical abilities. And it was a great way to while away the time as my computer updated itself.


-- Modified on 7/17/2003 3:42:20 PM

Beavis: "I'm, like, angry at numbers and stuff."
Butt-head: "Yeah. There's, like, too many of 'em."

Uhmmm .... [THINK! ... THINK!]

oh crap!  i'm not smart enough to come up with a punchline!







anyone? ... a little help?