Comment by moserware | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moserware | Hacker News Reader

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(copied from the comment I left on the post)

I think a lot of programmers were turned off to math by boring classes that focused way too much time on how to calculate rather than applying it. This typically happened early in their life and was unfortunately followed by reinforcement in later classes that that is all math is.

The biggest leap I took in math was when I started unlearning this math brokenness due to a great math teacher in middle school. Had this not happened, I doubt I would have been excited about the math.

On my blog, I've been trying to show very cool applications of slightly advanced math such as explaining how the Xbox Live TrueSkill algorithm uses some basic statistics to rank and match people. It's a beautiful application of "statistical machine learning." In addition, I tried to show how the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) uses some really neat finite field algebra.

The hardest part is overcoming people's fear. This fear has been reinforced so much that you really have to go out of your way to break through the fearful blank stare people get when anything math related is mentioned. I'm just trying to take baby steps now; it's really hard.

Math is simple language that has been refined for centuries. It's sad that so much fear is associated with it. Leslie Lamport's interview on Channel9 goes into this more.

I read your TrueSkill article, and it was very thorough. Coincidentally, I was looking over the papers and things for a few days just prior, trying to figure out all leaps that the authors made. The math was simple, but there are a few gaps to actually implementing the thing! I didn't quite get to the part where I would email them, but I was amazed that you spent 6 months on understanding it. Good for you for being persistent!

As for math, unfortunately it applies to the general public too. It's part fear, but also they keep telling themselves they're not good at it - and not trying in response. Math is a mature field, and as such, there's quite a bit of it to get going. It's tough to catch up years of math without doing it.

A peculiar part of it is that some people correlates math with calculations at an early age, the simple arithmetic operations. Maybe it's unfortunate that it is such an easy metric to see who's better at it - easy negative reinforcement.

One of my algorithms professor in college explained to me that in (research) math, it's all about being creative, seeing things and making connections, and teaching understandings. I try to keep that in mind whenever I read up on math, though I am eager about everything to learn in general!

I'll link to your TrueSkill post for those who haven't read it (it's excellent): http://www.moserware.com/2010/03/computing-your-skill.html

Although I already knew and understood TrueSkill before your post, it helped solidify my understanding. I hope you write more articles like that in the future :)

Thanks for the kind words! I try to write posts that would have helped me understand a topic. I've found that I can get to a hand-wavy understanding of a topic in a reasonable amount of time and then an actual understanding that I can communicate to others in an unreasonable amount of time :)

Sometimes it takes a month, but the TrueSkill one took about six months.

I've learned that deeply understanding a topic (especially one that has non-trivial math involved) doesn't cause a net loss in the amount of "math fog" in my head, it just moves it to a different place (often one that I never new existed before).

As a schoolboy, it was tempting to think that one day I'd "arrive" in math. I just don't think that's realistic. At best, I've just learned to be comfortable wandering around in the perpetual fog.

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