I’m always jealous when I hear about mathematical prodigies who are doing advanced work at young ages. I would have been one of them if I only I had someone who was willing to teach me math more complicated than arithmetic!
I’m sure we’d all be (all of Less Wrong, except I, who am not very smart—that’s some weird grammar by the way that I just used) mathematical prodigies—if we only had someone who was willing to teach us math, because Gods know why, we were too lazy to go to a public library, pick up the books and study ourselves!
One can waste a lot of time, especially at the start when most of the literature is inaccessible and one lacks common sense to at least look through standard curricula—this can be easily fixed with the right guidance. Plus, it’s not obvious that learning research science can be fun, something I had no idea about up to the last years of college (there was language barrier as well).
I’m sure we’d all be (all of Less Wrong, except I, who am not very smart—that’s some weird grammar by the way that I just used) mathematical prodigies—if we only had someone who was willing to teach us math, because Gods know why, we were too lazy to go to a public library, pick up the books and study ourselves!
One can waste a lot of time, especially at the start when most of the literature is inaccessible and one lacks common sense to at least look through standard curricula—this can be easily fixed with the right guidance. Plus, it’s not obvious that learning research science can be fun, something I had no idea about up to the last years of college (there was language barrier as well).
At the time, I didn’t know my public library had such textbooks. :(