Math Learning Struggles

As someone who just finished school, I’m trying to figure out how to get genuinely interested in mathematics. I’ve never been particularly strong at it, yet I’m planning to enter a university program that demands a high level of math. The problem is, it’s hard to motivate myself to study math for its own sake. For example, I loved learning programming because it’s hands‑on—I can build something and immediately see the results. In everyday life, though, I rarely need more than basic arithmetic or

Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

To understand higher maths intelligence is not enough. It is necessary, but not sufficient. To understand mathematics, someone needs discipline and hard work. Years of preparation, years of study of topics you don’t know for what they can be useful. But, as far as you go deeper in maths, more you understand the meaning of the first steps and theirs contents. It is a BS opinion that one which says that maths is something got by putting bricks over bricks. By the contrary, it consists of an eterna

This is a topic I'm really interested in, and I do sympathize with your situation. I have no advice for you, but here's my experience.I hold a Masters in EE (control theory). I have never really found studying Mathematics formidably intimidating, probably because I've been at it for some time now.But I totally suck at the following things:- Solving problems that require really inspired "crux" moves. Think IMO level problems, lighter versions of Euler's solution to the Basel probl

I'm working on an open source guide to exactly this, but it needs more peer review: https://github.com/EternityForest/AnyoneCanDoIt/blob/master/...It's not actually a guide to learning math, it's a primer on what math does, how it's used and where, how it fits into culture, and how you can get by if you d

I think that's part of what the author is trying to approach in the article. I could be wrong, but the engineering students were probably immersed in math way more than you were, so concepts that seemed natural to them were only because they'd banged their head against it more often.I run into this a lot when people talk to me about programming and I get something faster than they do. I've spent a lot of time reading book after book, listening to podcasts, learning new langua

I took the most rigorous college degree in Sweden and did pure maths up to masters level. High school maths included calculus, although not as rigorous as you learn at college.> If you've had this happen too often you're probably just bad at explaining things, or even worse you haven't fully understood them.I understood the subjects well enough too solve problems on exams I hadn't seen before. That was the main way I managed to get good grades without doing practice

"Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them."

"Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them."

In my experience, getting good at math requires first that you accept that your intuitions suck. Your natural intuition will constantly lead you astray mathematically. People who struggle with algebra are often people who are trusting their intuitions about what is correct. Eventually, you internalize the rules and they become your intuition. But to suggest that we should skip the rules and instead try to build up intuition seems rather wrong-headed to me.