Comment by MexicanReformis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MexicanReformis | Hacker News Reader

MexicanReformis

Growing up I found Mathematics difficult to grasp for various reasons. One of them required mental gymnastics of "hidden" rules and exceptions to the rules. There would always be rules that were often forgotten. And one of the bigger problems I had was forcing myself to practice these exercises. In order to store this information one must actually practice these problems many times to have it lodged into your brain for later use. Being a kid made it even more of an obstacle since I always wanted to play outside or hangout with friends.

It seemed that mathematics required more of my time than any of the subjects. So wouldn't spend the necessary time needed to actually store it in my head. Later in life, I realized how fascinating math was, and fell in love with it. Even though I am still not good at it, it's fun to solve puzzles.

> One of them required mental gymnastics of "hidden" rules and exceptions to the rules. There would always be rules that were often forgotten.

Could you elaborate on this? Mathematics, perhaps uniquely among human intellectual endeavours, has no hidden rules. Its rules may be complicated and unintuitive at times, but they can be listed; and whatever follows from these listed rules is true (to be precise: whatever follows from the axioms is true in any model of the axioms), and whatever contradicts them is false, regardless of how natural or un- it may seem.

In particular, I am curious what you mean by "There would always be rules that were often forgotten." Do you mean that you forgot them, or that your teachers forgot them (both of which were eminently believeable!), or that practicing, professional mathematicians forget them? I am sceptical of the last (although plenty of, indeed probably all, professional mathematicians don't need to keep all the rules explicitly in their heads at all times), and, although I am eminently willing to believe the first two, I think that that shows a fault in the teacher, not the subject.

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