4 ms·
I'd felt exactly the same a couple years back, but the root cause was rather amusing. When I started working on stuff for Directed Edge I dove into a lot of ac
by wheels 16y ago
I'd felt exactly the same a couple years back, but the root cause was rather amusing. When I started working on stuff for Directed Edge I dove into a lot of academic research. I found myself struggling with a lot of it. I really believed that my math abilities had slipped significantly since my glory days and continued with this perception for several months...
...until I picked up some stuff that I'd thought was hard in college. I was dumbfounded at how easy it was. What had changed was not my math abilities, but my perception of what constituted hard math.
- tjarratt 16y agoMy experience with Haskell reflects this pretty closely. A year ago I was using it primarily for scripting and daily exercise but I couldn't get past monads as a concept. A few days ago I brought out Learn You A Haskell and took a look at the monad section and suddenly it all made sense. Sometimes your unconscious needs time to digest concepts and internalize them before you can master them and move on to hairier problems.
- nostrademons 16y agoI've noticed the same thing. I'll routinely struggle to understand an academic paper with a notation-heavy theoretical bent, but when I found I had to dig out high school math for a couple 2D-graphics problems recently, it all came back easily. When you're in high school, you don't realize how much of a gulf there is between Ph.D/MS-level (or even professional-level) math and what you learn in school. The public school system teaches you the barest foundations; there's a gigantic world out there beyond it.