The disparity between your verbal and math abilities is unusually large, even more so because you are also very good at logic. I hypothesize that, even though you might not have enough innate math talent to get a college degree in math, your difficulty passing calculus is the result of an accumulation of misunderstandings related to mediocre or poor teaching. As an experienced math teacher and tutor, my judgment is that anyone with an IQ two SDs or so above average is capable of fully understanding math up through 1-variable calculus (as are the majority of people 1 SD above averag, but pretty much no one in the left half of the bell curve), but it might require a significant amount of “unlearning” and then relearning the prerequisite math topics in the right way. There are undoubtedly limits to your math potential, but it seems quite unlikely to me that your mind would fail to grasp Calculus if it were properly trained, given your good score on the Math SAT and obvious logical ability. However, it’s not the kind of thing you could do by self-study, you’d need an experienced tutor who could figure out where your prior understanding of math was blocking you.
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.
The disparity between your verbal and math abilities is unusually large, even more so because you are also very good at logic. I hypothesize that, even though you might not have enough innate math talent to get a college degree in math, your difficulty passing calculus is the result of an accumulation of misunderstandings related to mediocre or poor teaching. As an experienced math teacher and tutor, my judgment is that anyone with an IQ two SDs or so above average is capable of fully understanding math up through 1-variable calculus (as are the majority of people 1 SD above averag, but pretty much no one in the left half of the bell curve), but it might require a significant amount of “unlearning” and then relearning the prerequisite math topics in the right way. There are undoubtedly limits to your math potential, but it seems quite unlikely to me that your mind would fail to grasp Calculus if it were properly trained, given your good score on the Math SAT and obvious logical ability. However, it’s not the kind of thing you could do by self-study, you’d need an experienced tutor who could figure out where your prior understanding of math was blocking you.
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.