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Cloud
Sexico5880 Posts
 Well sadist, it sucks for you that you got so alienated from maths. I taught myself all the way up to differential equations, which is basically the most advanced maths you're gonna need for most engineerings.Knowing the practical application does help in creating interest. That's why a good book is important. But I also went through easily half a dozen books on each subject till I found my ideal ones (I did despise just formularies): I can give you their names if you care for them. | ||
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Sadistx
Zimbabwe5568 Posts
as an econ major, at a school where "econ" is really "take shitloads of partial derivatives of abstract economic concepts," Not really abstract though, most of the time you're maximizing a function with respect to a variable, and the variable most of the time is some sort of firm decision or input - quantity to produce, price to set, labor to use, etc. The basic concept of this is calculus I - minimizing and maximizing a function. You are right though, I do have a lot of beef with mathematic (and especially statistical notation). A lot of time the book or prof's writing on the board will contain basically 3 lines of pyre symbols, and while I can recognize the most common stuff, there's still a dozen letters that make me feel like an archaeology intern deciphering the rosetta stone. Is it a subscript, is it a superscript, is it something important, does it matter if its a capital letter, etc. | ||
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Caller
Poland8075 Posts
On November 03 2009 01:26 Sadistx wrote: Not really abstract though, most of the time you're maximizing a function with respect to a variable, and the variable most of the time is some sort of firm decision or input - quantity to produce, price to set, labor to use, etc. The basic concept of this is calculus I - minimizing and maximizing a function. You are right though, I do have a lot of beef with mathematic (and especially statistical notation). A lot of time the book or prof's writing on the board will contain basically 3 lines of pyre symbols, and while I can recognize the most common stuff, there's still a dozen letters that make me feel like an archaeology intern deciphering the rosetta stone. Is it a subscript, is it a superscript, is it something important, does it matter if its a capital letter, etc. derive the price effect of a general utility function s.t. budget constraint p1x1 + p2x2 = M that's the typical question I have to answer T_T | ||
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Sadistx
Zimbabwe5568 Posts
What school do you go to/what year? And what are you taking right now. | ||
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EtherealDeath
United States8366 Posts
On November 02 2009 13:23 Plexa wrote: I'm a math major, and I agree with what he said. Any math at undergrad level is exactly what he described (and if you don't see that then just think really hard about all the math you've done). It's not until you start doing higher level stuff and research that its not just a mechanical process anymore. Yea you can definitely mechanize it to a point (after beginning grad classes it is not so automated imo, although certainly knowing the theorems off the top of your head will help). However, that's just no fun  The entire fun of math is the concepts because they are just... fucked up, for lack of a better phrase. But in a good way. | ||
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Sadist
United States7328 Posts
On November 03 2009 01:12 Cloud wrote: Well sadist, it sucks for you that you got so alienated from maths. I taught myself all the way up to differential equations, which is basically the most advanced maths you're gonna need for most engineerings.Knowing the practical application does help in creating interest. That's why a good book is important. But I also went through easily half a dozen books on each subject till I found my ideal ones (I did despise just formularies): I can give you their names if you care for them. I agree this seems to be the best way. If you learn it on your own and struggle through it you are more likely to remember it IMO. I know Richard Feynman basically taught himself calc from a book and he claimed the book he used was great....but from my limited experience with math books id say most suck balls. I agree with the other poster who said they assume you know way too much. Thats probably the heart of the issue with the way its taught. My fluids book is the say damn way. God I hate it right now | ||
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EtherealDeath
United States8366 Posts
On November 03 2009 04:54 Sadist wrote: I agree this seems to be the best way. If you learn it on your own and struggle through it you are more likely to remember it IMO. I know Richard Feynman basically taught himself calc from a book and he claimed the book he used was great....but from my limited experience with math books id say most suck balls. I agree with the other poster who said they assume you know way too much. Thats probably the heart of the issue with the way its taught. My fluids book is the say damn way. God I hate it right now There are pretty good calc books. The one I had in high school was particularly good imo, but I don't remember either the authors or title >.> The cover had a spiral shell on it, with a lot of shades of blue used in the coloring of the cover. It also came in two versions, a complete version, and also a version broken in two, with the first part covering what is approximately calc AB/BC, and the second part covering Differential equations. Maybe someone can think of the name from this description. Unfortunately random wiki'ing doesn't appear to be very effective for math, since everything is referred to in the general version, which results in countless hours of following links until you get an idea of all the various concepts that you would never learn until later in college, just to understand topics you would cover early on. However, even that can be fun if you have patience, but it's definitely not very learner-friendly imo. | ||
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MK
United States496 Posts
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illu
Canada2531 Posts
On November 03 2009 05:20 MK wrote: I like Math. Give this man a cookie. | ||
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Caller
Poland8075 Posts
On November 03 2009 04:41 Sadistx wrote: Isn't that pretty basic micro/macro? Individual budget constraints, substitution effect, and so on and so forth. What school do you go to/what year? And what are you taking right now. thats pretty much it, and im a second year at uchicago, and this is the first econ course except he doesnt use numbers | ||
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ninjafetus
United States231 Posts
On November 03 2009 00:57 Plexa wrote: If you have ever read Ruden then you would have the opposite problem to the one you had. The proofs are so elegant and streamlined that working out where the fuck that argument came from and understand each step is a serious mission lol Rudin is a beast. He's a great supplement to other books, though. His Functional Analysis helped me a lot when the more accessible book I was using didn't go into enough depth. I actually liked Royden's Reals book, personally. | ||
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conCentrate9
United States438 Posts
I'm a freshman at a university, and I'm taking Calc 2 right now. I plan to major in math, but I'm curious what options there are for a math major in the real world, so I was hoping some of you math majors could enlighten me. | ||
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mdainoob
United States51 Posts
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