understand math

120 pages of high school math down in 10 days! Yahoo! At this rate I’ll cover high school math at level A in less than three months. I feel so motivated :) (doing the Evan dance)

- – 8%– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – -

I’m taking a year og sabbath from my university study of Japanese, and therefore I decided to brush up on some of my lost skills and ideally become even better than I used to be. An important one is math, since I may be studying computer science next year rather than Japanese. Supermemo is my tool of choice and and during the last three days, I’ve memorized the initial 60 pages of my old math book from the first year of high school. It has resultet in about 400 question-answer pairs (known as elements) in Supermemo. Using my hopefully soon to be rediscovered math skills I have calculated that this book will result in about 2500 elements and that my entire high school curiculum will result in about 6500 elements. Afterwards I plan on memorizing Gilbert Strang’s Calculus, which I estimate will result in 4-5000 elements.

That means I’m approaching the 4% mark og my initial quest or put another way, I’ve reached the | on this line:
- |- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

If my ASCII skills were better I would make a insightful graph right here, but they aren’t, so I’ll just stop now ;)

To me math is really simple, but it takes practise, a lot and lot of practise. If anyone has any math problems, I hope I can help and help you to really understand them.

I did higher math, we were only ten of us that were in the class, that had good enough grades and were willing to do it, out of a total of 70 students, i took the challenge because i love it. It’s a challenge worth taking because i think without challenges life is pointless ( yes, i love pain) and goalless ( if that’s a word :)). Even though i don’t do so well everytime, and i can hate it, it’s the only subject that i have enough patience to do and i know i can do.

So my advice:
I realised that if you stress less and stop thinking of it as a struggle it will be easier, you actually create your own mental block. I also know that anybody is capable of understanding it if they really want to. Towards the end of the year there were only three of us that showed up to class because the pressure was so immense (the rest did show up for finals though, i think they needed a break until then ;) ), but at least now i get university credit for it and can look back and say that i really learnt something. The moment you realise you understand complex numbers, calculus, proof by induction ( haha the picture above describes it so well) and some messed up probabilty questions has got to be one of the best. My advice is just to practice, short cuts won’t do, and try to visualise math into something more concrete rather than just numbers on a piece of paper. I don’t think you ever fully understand math, it’s something beyond us, but it’s worth trying. I hope I succesfully continue with it and understand it the more I seek to learn.

I once likes math. But somewhere along the way my interest faded. I would like to refind this interest, this fascination. Especially because a science closely realted to math interests me alot: Computer science.