Math subjects you hate - Like /sci/, but on KF

[Strange Looking Dog]

Not really a math subject per se, but there's a fair number of self important mathematicians who want to argue that the universe is fundamentally made of math, and I find that school of thought both retarded and very, very, stupid. First of all, arguing about what the universe is made of in an abstract sense is basically just philosophaggotry, but on top of that math is literally just a human invention created to quantify the universe. I frankly think they are just insecure.

I never understood the concept of "imaginary numbers".

It always sounded pointless and dumb to me.

It's a solution to an inevitable problem. If -1 * -1 = 1 and √1 = 1, then what is √-1? Given that the square root reverses the square function —√A² = A— we must ask what we can square to get -1. In other words; what value i solves i * i = -1.
Turns out this isn't a number you can just count to, so mathematicians decided to label it 'i' or 'imaginary'. The name is somewhat arbitrary, but it could be excused as imaginary numbers usually only appear when you scrutinize math a little bit. Clearly nobody ever talks about owning 3000 i dollars to the bankers but I'll pray for their salvation if they do end up in such a situation

I couldn't wrap my head around algebra. It was the letters mixed in with the numbers. I sat for 3 weeks in Alg2 until I asked the teach "who decided that "e" should be "e".? He excused me from Alg2 and I took an extra Lit class. I however loved Geometry. It was visual and made sense to me. Plus I was able to build a set of stairs with Geometry. I found it useful for my life. Algebra, not so much.

Algebra is literally just the application of rules and patterns. For example, given rules A + B = C, A = -2, and B = A + A what is C? If you apply the third rule to the first you get C = A + A + A, and then applying the second to that gets you C = -2 - 2 - 2 or C = -6. Roughly speaking all I'm doing is replacing a pattern that matches one side of the equals sign with what's on the other side, and while this is a very basic example you can scale this up and solve pretty much anything.
Geometry is for the Greeks lol

And this is supposed to be the CS class

I think ultimately you'll find it very useful. You'll be able to solve a respectable amount of equations on autopilot using it, and it's practically a requirement for anything dealing with space —be it 2D, 3D, or beyond. Linear algebra is the only college course I've ever taken, but given my interest in computers it was probably the best way I could have spent my money.

Is math actually needed? Never use it in my daily life, and what little I would need it for can be handled by a fuckbutt TI calculator. Unless you are going into engineering or banking and the like, having it be required coursework for an art degree is exceptional

Art is gay, so think of math as being PREP for your mind.

For your health

 

[Lemmingwise]

Is math actually needed? Never use it in my daily life, and what little I would need it for can be handled by a fuckbutt TI calculator. Unless you are going into engineering or banking and the like, having it be required coursework for an art degree is exceptional

This why artists always get fucked by record companies and the like.

 

[Safir]

Turns out this isn't a number you can just count to, so mathematicians decided to label it 'i' or 'imaginary'.

Just gonna call that out, you can't count to transcendental numbers such as pi and e either, but those are real.

It's trivial to count to an integer or rational (one that can be represented as a simple fraction, such as 252/119) number, and complicated but possible to count to an algebraic irrational number (one that cannot be represented as a fraction but is a root of some equation of the form a*x^n + b*x^(n-1) + ... + f = 0, where a, b, ...., f are integers).

However, the real axis - indeed, every interval of the real axis, no matter how small - contains infinitely many transcendental numbers which can't be counted to at all.

Now, imaginary numbers aren't on the real axis, because every real number squared is some non-negative number. Where are they then? We say they're on the imaginary axis, which runs perpendicular to the real axis and intersects it at zero. Then, multiplying a number by i is equivalent to rotating it 90 degrees, multiplying it by i twice is equivalent to rotating it 180 degrees (if it was real, it lands on the opposite half of the real axis, just according to keikaku, as, x * i * i = x * (-1) = -x), and multiplying it by sqrt(1/2) + i*sqrt(1/2) is rotating it 45 degrees. It turns out that in many practical applications, this rotation property is extremely useful: cosine waves (so, AC and electromagnetic waves) can be represented as rotation where the real part of the complex function is the actual physically measurable property (current, field strength).

It gets better. Suppose you need to integrate a function over an interval, but there's a problem point on it in which the function is undefined, what to do? Why, just take a tiny detour around the problem point through the complex plane, then take the limit of the result with the length of the detour approaching zero+. Kind of a Road Runner solution, but it actually works.

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Anyway, to answer the OP, I hate integration and everything to do with integration, including differential equations. If it's more complicated than x" + ax = 0, it can fuck right off.

Linear algebra is awesome tho. Stay strong, @FuckedUp . Go pirate better textbooks.
Look into some easy machine learning so you can practice applying the concepts: find a newb course that covers Principal Component Analysis, then start from the beginning (linear regression, probably). It should take you two weeks tops to get from that through PCA, and if you get to neural networks you'll have a head start on tensors and shit.

 

[WhoBusTank69]

Learning math depends entirely on the one teaching you. My experiences started going downhill with a student-teacher gone full time since she was clearly overwhelmed and had no intention of actually helping anyone.

That being said, math can go fuck itself because the order of operations keeps changing. I was taught PEMDAS, currently it's "BEDMAS" because some asshole doesn't know what parenthesis are and makes every equation I previously did incorrect by making you divide before multiplying.

 

[byuu]

What I really hated in linear algebra, were Eigenspaces.
You learn this hundred step algorithm to calculate them but no one ever explains to you what the fuck they actually are.
I hate doing things manually that any CAS can do better than me without any real understanding of what I'm doing.

 

[Strange Looking Dog]

Just gonna call that out, you can't count to transcendental numbers such as pi and e either, but those are real.

It's trivial to count to an integer or rational (one that can be represented as a simple fraction, such as 252/119) number, and complicated but possible to count to an algebraic irrational number (one that cannot be represented as a fraction but is a root of some equation of the form a*x^n + b*x^(n-1) + ... + f = 0, where a, b, ...., f are integers).

Fair, but how could I put that concisely? You can't count to infinitesimals either, but they're on the same axis roughly. I mostly wanted to get across the idea that they can't be reached just by traveling along the number line. I was actually going to put a little bit about complex numbers in there too but it was too long for my liking lol

 

[Positron]

I know that's normal, it's just that proofs are a college thing.

More like a Middle-school thing in Asia -- and the West say their curricula are noting but cramming facts.

 

[dreamworks face]

Linear algebra was my personal "fuck this, I'm out" math class in undergrad - I found calculus straightforward but linear is such a gatekeeping slog of a class. I've regretted not paying attention in the class as much as I could've because I've definitely some bad days at work involving linear algebra (the worst being having to write javascript to do cubic bezier splines through a set of exact points, the second worst being drawing scout lines) - maybe I would've done better if it weren't at 8:30 am, who knows.

 

[Raging Capybara]

I never understood the concept of "imaginary numbers".

It always sounded pointless and dumb to me.

Those are the most important numbers in the history of humanity. We wouldn't have Quaternions without them, and what does it mean? It means we would be unable to animate 3D objects in video games. No bouncing anime boobs for you without imaginary numbers.

Hell would be a better destiny.

 

[Jason Wynn]

Trig always tripped me up somewhat. I had a lot of math teachers in high school who didn't give a shit and couldn't care less about actually teaching the subject.

 

[Christ Cried]

I hate proof driven topics a lot. I know they're necessary, but they were such a hurdle for me in college and I'll never forgive them

 

[He Who Points And Laughs]

Statistics.

 

[Superman93]

Discrete Math.

Nothing makes any sense and thats the point.

 

[Technetium]

I'm probably just being judgemental, but I'm surprised by how many people, even at a science PhD level, seem to hate the maths subject "basic multiplications and sums", based on how often I see them pull out their smartphone, scroll to the calculator app, "uuhhh just a second", just to input some really basic multiplications or even short sums.

Learning math depends entirely on the one teaching you. My experiences started going downhill with a student-teacher gone full time since she was clearly overwhelmed and had no intention of actually helping anyone.

Yes, I still credit my high school teacher for teaching me to fully appreciate maths. I went from barely understanding how a Cartesian graph works, to becoming pretty good at solving integrals and stuff, all because he went methodically, step by step, from the basic stuff to the more complex stuff over the years. He made a complete spazz like me enjoy maths. A lot of other teachers were more chaotic in their approach, or, like in your case, obviously didn't give a damn, so only the really smart people could be good in their math classes.

With that said, I still struggle with basic probability stuff.

That being said, math can go fuck itself because the order of operations keeps changing. I was taught PEMDAS, currently it's "BEDMAS" because some asshole doesn't know what parenthesis are and makes every equation I previously did incorrect by making you divide before multiplying.

Is this true? There was a discussion about this in the cursed images thread, because someone posted an image with an operation that said "both answers are right". So much for keeping mathematics objective...

 

[Linako 2.0]

I haven't done math past arithmetic and some basic geometry in years, but I remember not liking geometry since finding solving for y when there was already an x in the equation was confusing enough.
I do remember loving to work with graphs.

Is this true? There was a discussion about this in the cursed images thread, because someone posted an image with an operation that said "both answers are right". So much for keeping mathematics objective...

I heard that it was PEMDAS in the US and BEMDAS everywhere else like the metric system

 

[Technetium]

Come to think of it, is there some way to demonstrate that e.g. the multiplication in an operation has priority over the order in which the numbers are written, as in it's an absolute mathematical law, or is it really just a convention?

 

[Un Platano]

Come to think of it, is there some way to demonstrate that e.g. the multiplication in an operation has priority over the order in which the numbers are written, as in it's an absolute mathematical law, or is it really just a convention?

Multiplication of any complex numbers (which includes real numbers) is commutative, meaning that it does not matter what order they are multiplied in. This is usually taken as an axiom of algebra, meaning that it is that way because we define it to be so.

Situations where a proof is desired can be answered in set theory. The set of all complex numbers is closed under the multiplication operation, meaning that multiplication of any two numbers in the set of all complex numbers yields another number in that set. A consequence of this is that any two numbers used in the multiplication operation must always yield the same answer, meaning that the order they are multiplied in does not matter.

There are many situations however where multiplication of two elements is not commutative, such as multiplying vectors. However, the multiplication operation for these objects is defined differently from scalar multiplication and so does not exhibit all the same properties such as commutativity.

 

[Technetium]

Multiplication of any complex numbers (which includes real numbers) is commutative, meaning that it does not matter what order they are multiplied in. This is usually taken as an axiom of algebra, meaning that it is that way because we define it to be so.

Situations where a proof is desired can be answered in set theory. The set of all complex numbers is closed under the multiplication operation, meaning that multiplication of any two numbers in the set of all complex numbers yields another number in that set. A consequence of this is that any two numbers used in the multiplication operation must always yield the same answer, meaning that the order they are multiplied in does not matter.

There are many situations however where multiplication of two elements is not commutative, such as multiplying vectors. However, the multiplication operation for these objects is defined differently from scalar multiplication and so does not exhibit all the same properties such as commutativity.

Right, that's commutativity for multiplications. But, (without going into vector maths), how can you demonstrate that 2+3*4 is equals to 14 and not 20? With the absence of parenthesis, the order of the operations is not linear but the multiplication takes priority: isn't this just out of convention, rather than by mathematical law?

 

[byuu]

isn't this just out of convention, rather than by mathematical law?

Yes, it's just a convention. Without it you'd have to write 2+(3*4) every time.
If we didn't use infix we wouldn't have that problem to begin: 2 3 4 * +.

 

[Un Platano]

Right, that's commutativity for multiplications. But, (without going into vector maths), how can you demonstrate that 2+3*4 is equals to 14 and not 20? With the absence of parenthesis, the order of the operations is not linear but the multiplication takes priority: isn't this just out of convention, rather than by mathematical law?

You could if you so desired remove the order of operations and require everything to be notated using parentheses and otherwise read everything sequentially. In that notation, 2+3*4 would ne equivalent to (2+3)*4 and would equal 20, and to get 14 you would need 2+(3*4). We don't do that because it would require a simple equation such as 1-2x^2 be written as 1-(2(x^2)). Using the order of operations eliminates the need to use parentheses around every single element in an equation to keep them grouped together.