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Not in math. Unless you are a mathematician, I challenge you to pick a math equivalent of "I want to create a website where people can buy and sell yarn." I’ll
by oefrha 8y ago
Not in math. Unless you are a mathematician, I challenge you to pick a math equivalent of "I want to create a website where people can buy and sell yarn." I’ll wait.
People just assume learning math is the same as learning everything else. That is not even remotely true.
- _recommendation 8y agoGenuinely curious - why do you think that? I have been self studying math for about 4 years now and find it to be the same as everything else that's worth learning: hard! But I haven't found that it's some entirely different realm divorced from all other intellectual pursuits.
- oefrha 8y agoI don’t really have time to give a thoughtful answer (it would be quite long), but the exact post you responded to gave an obvious difference. To roughly summarize that difference, producing anything of value in mathematics requires learning a tremendous amount of prior art, and without a tremendous amount of work you won’t even know what’s of value. It’s no wonder that many crackpots choose to work on high profile number theory problems, like Goldbach’s conjecture and previously Fermat’s Last Theorem, since the formulations are simple enough for laypeople to understand, yet the theories behind developed over hundreds of years are incredibly deep. > everything else that’s worth learning: hard! I disagree. I’ve learned many things worth learning that are not hard at all, but to each their own.
- enraged_camel 8y agoWhat makes math special, exactly?