I agree with this. Like Scott, I sucked at math and excelled at English without any effort. At the age of thirty I decided to study physics at university. I was in a class with brilliant school leavers, top of their class in double A level math. I didn’t have a fraction of their background and had forgotten what little calculus I had learned (which turned out to be an advantage.) We had a math professor who taught us calculus from scratch, as if we were looking over Newton’s shoulder as he developed it to make sense of laboratory data. Together with a brilliant introduction to classical physics, it was like suddenly hearing poetry and music where before there was only cacophony; as if the universe opened a window to lay bare the truth. The experience convinced me that most smart people who think they hate math really only hate the way they were taught it, and I don’t blame them.
3blue1brown has an excellent youtube series “Essence of Calculus”—which presents the main intuitions geometrically, in a way that finally helped me remember the formulas for longer than a week. Each video is 15 minutes long and I haven’t seen a better introduction on the subject.
I agree with this. Like Scott, I sucked at math and excelled at English without any effort. At the age of thirty I decided to study physics at university. I was in a class with brilliant school leavers, top of their class in double A level math. I didn’t have a fraction of their background and had forgotten what little calculus I had learned (which turned out to be an advantage.) We had a math professor who taught us calculus from scratch, as if we were looking over Newton’s shoulder as he developed it to make sense of laboratory data. Together with a brilliant introduction to classical physics, it was like suddenly hearing poetry and music where before there was only cacophony; as if the universe opened a window to lay bare the truth. The experience convinced me that most smart people who think they hate math really only hate the way they were taught it, and I don’t blame them.
3blue1brown has an excellent youtube series “Essence of Calculus”—which presents the main intuitions geometrically, in a way that finally helped me remember the formulas for longer than a week. Each video is 15 minutes long and I haven’t seen a better introduction on the subject.