Something you’re just good at with minimal effort and/or you learned much more quickly than average.
For me, it’s paper snowflakes. My brain just seems to effortlessly figure out what cuts to make to the paper wedge to make it turn out exactly how I want it. Largely useless, but good fun and was a much-needed ego boost when I was a kid :]
With math, is it arithmetic that gives you trouble or the actual symbolic manipulation of mathematics?
I am hot garbage at keeping track of numbers but turn those fuckers into letters and (at least for me) it’s off to the races. Then I just convert everything back to numbers in the last step before jamming it all into a calculator. This method saved my ass in 400-level biochemistry courses. (Annoyed the shit out of the grad students grading my exams, I’m sure…)
You may be better at “math” than you think :]
I assure you, I’m really just not good at math. It just doesn’t click with me the same way physical systems do.
Being bad at math was the short explanation; the long explanation is because pure math is super unintuitive to me, I got low grades in it throughout public school and therefore never pursued a college that would go into it heavily, even though I love the sciences. I ended up just going to my mom’s Alma Mater, which is a liberal art school and therefore didn’t have an engineering department. I actually did end up getting a computational physics degree because I loved my intro to physics class so much. When I could actually relate the formulae to physical systems, I was good. Did great in my upper level calculus classes, too, because I took them in parallel to the physics classes that directly used them. However, the more theoretical classes like linear algebra I barely passed and when it got to really complicated particle/quantum stuff I suffered greatly. Wave functions are a blight upon this world and my electricity and magnetism final made me cry.
Good on you for just casually getting a computational physics degree without inherent math talent… like holy shit that’s impressive!
I have also cried over coursework on linear algebra as well as electricity and magnetism :') Brutal stuff.
Please could you explain a bit more about the process you describe, above? Maybe with some simple examples? I’m woeful at maths but really good with mechanical and physical problems. If there’s a way I can improve upon the former, I’d love to try.
Thanks in advance!
C = BxA
Move A underneath C and swap the equality
B = C/A
A lot of algebra is spatial manipulation.