I hated math in middle school and high school. This is despite loving science, and enjoying math all the way through Algebra 1. However, when I started taking Algebra 2 and beyond, it seemed like we shifted away from why things work to solving ever larger polynomials and other tedious tasks, getting points taken off along the way for a flipped sign or digit or moving a decimal point, even when the entire rest of the calculation was correct. I ended up doing a degree in computer engineering, and every class that involved algorithm design or programming I excelled at, while every "hard math class" (for example, statistics, electromagnetism, etc.) I barely passed.
I didn't fall back in love with math until I took discrete mathematics and signal processing in the same semester, and then later a class on algorithms and formal models of computation. They showed me that math was actually beautiful and fascinating, an art form unto itself. These three classes showed me how amazing math can be; I remember particularly that the day we learned about FFT's my brain felt like it had ascended into another dimension. They truly felt magical. Same thing with learning about recurrence relations and finally "getting" dynamic programming.
Now I love math, and I am planning on taking this holiday break to finally crack open the Principia Mathematica and trying to really understand it (a personal goal of mine for several years). I can't wait to share the joy of mathematics with my kids when they're old enough. I just hope that they don't get bogged down in the mechanical, number crunching part like I did and manage to continue to see the beauty of the underlying ideas.
I hated math in middle school and high school. This is despite loving science, and enjoying math all the way through Algebra 1. However, when I started taking Algebra 2 and beyond, it seemed like we shifted away from why things work to solving ever larger polynomials and other tedious tasks, getting points taken off along the way for a flipped sign or digit or moving a decimal point, even when the entire rest of the calculation was correct. I ended up doing a degree in computer engineering, and every class that involved algorithm design or programming I excelled at, while every "hard math class" (for example, statistics, electromagnetism, etc.) I barely passed.
I didn't fall back in love with math until I took discrete mathematics and signal processing in the same semester, and then later a class on algorithms and formal models of computation. They showed me that math was actually beautiful and fascinating, an art form unto itself. These three classes showed me how amazing math can be; I remember particularly that the day we learned about FFT's my brain felt like it had ascended into another dimension. They truly felt magical. Same thing with learning about recurrence relations and finally "getting" dynamic programming.
Now I love math, and I am planning on taking this holiday break to finally crack open the Principia Mathematica and trying to really understand it (a personal goal of mine for several years). I can't wait to share the joy of mathematics with my kids when they're old enough. I just hope that they don't get bogged down in the mechanical, number crunching part like I did and manage to continue to see the beauty of the underlying ideas.