This may also spell the end of my mathematical career as a serious student[...]
This is confusing.
So what are you up to? Simply catching up with the stuff you always wanted to do/learn? Waiting for what the future might bring?
Concentrating on my other courses, so that I actually get something out of them. I'm going to try to blow through the first couple of chapters of my Russian textbook this weekend, and then I have various Greek philosophers to study, my history of math textbook to start eating, and some abstract algebra to learn about.
Plus a little time spent watching Russian (or German, haven't decided yet) movies and reading crime novels/working on my topology textbook, because that was neat, playing card games with my housemates, history books (
) and so on.
Basically, I've realized that I learn best when I have spare time to explore other options. I do not learn well when I have someone saying "Learn this, learn this all the time, and your off time belongs to me, now and forever." I'm currently doing well in my rhetoric class because I spent a couple years analyzing the hell out of every novel I came across and developing basic nihilism/existentialism/evolutionary psychology theoretical frameworks as I tried to go to sleep. No one told me to do that, or even really knew I was doing it. It's resulted in a major advantage over other students, though, which I intend to keep and wring out for all I can.
I don't think I'll be a good mathematician if I just pound down the math all day. What has made me good at math thus far has been my mental flexibility and creativity--my ability to bring concepts into different frameworks, to see things differently, to conceptualize. If I want to succeed, I need to nip this mental stagnation in the bud and start prying my mind open again. Look at new concepts. Build new frameworks. Stop confusing Russian with Polish and French (it was horrible. I kept responding in French in class today, or wanting to say "co" instead of "kto").
Hell, maybe I'll write some short stories. No matter what, my goal is to learn as much as I can about whatever I can, and be happy. Force-feeding myself math does not make me happy
or well-educated. Studying math along with philosophy, Russian, theater, cinematography, history... well, that makes me very, very happy. Also well-educated.
Dammit, I want some time to read and take notes on my 1,500-page brick about the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. Is that too much to ask?
@Solifuge: Having been in your shoes as far as feeling that my education was getting nowhere and I wasn't learning anything in any of my courses, I'd suggest studying allied fields and asking your professors suitable questions. For example,
Mathematics -> Physics, programming, art, language, architecture, botany, history
Philosophy -> Rhetoric, languages, mathematical logic
Biology -> Chemistry, physics, discrete mathematics, statistics, painting, archaeology and anthropology
In my experience, this kind of study is what builds one an advantage over one's peers and ingratiates one to one's professors, and makes it so that one can easily shift from one frame of reference to another. It helps you speak with people, and they'll frequently offer opportunities--if you know what those opportunities look like.
I'd say: do anything, study anything, try anything as long as you're learning and not just wasting time due to sheer unhappiness. I can't happily say "Oh, I'm just wasting time" anymore. Don't just lie on the grass, observe the sensation, catalog it, connect it... do whatever you have to. Do whatever you can to render yourself passionate. There's loads of information free (and even legal!) on the internet, novels through Project Gutenberg, teach-yourself-language sites, many videos on Youtube... there's local libraries, university libraries, word-of-mouth, simple natural observation. A journal is a great place to teach yourself the basics of philosophy, literary analysis, and psychology, to learn how to
observe rather than simply seeing.
You can do it.
As for my personal worries of the day, I think my rhetoric teacher may have been slightly shocked at my anger towards philosophy majors using mathematics to make points about rationalism when they have no idea as to what they're actually discussing at all.
I guess I'd probably better lay low for the next couple of sessions, although I nearly busted a gasket today listening to people questioning basic addition. We already fixed that problem! The only thing you really need to do is to distinguish one object starts from wherever it ends, build a little machinery, presto! Natural numbers, integers, rationals, reals, all with some extremely nice properties--including 1+1=2.
You can argue about the ability to distinguish between objects all you want, but if you're going to argue that more than one object exists--and that, in fact, every object is entirely unique--you are not allowed to say that 1+1 =/= 2, because what you have really discovered is that 1+1 =/= 1, and the Peano Axioms could have told you that!
And they're all sitting there, nodding their heads and smiling happily because they can disprove mathematics they never understood, never discussed, never studied. I don't mind silly conjectures that break mathematics, or even people being wrong in general. I dislike their application of "logic" to this fundamentally logical subject, as though they fully understood the tools and the subject matter at hand, and could apply those tools to gain meaningful results. As though their words were real mathematics.
Pffaugh.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9772609 times)