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Math seems difficult because it takes time and energy. Many people don't experience sufficient time to "get" math lessons, and they fall behind as the teacher m

• jasperry 6y ago
  It's true that people fall behind in math, but the bright side is that since knowledge isn't a physical structure, you can always go back and strengthen the foundations later. Plenty of theories have been useful before mathematical foundations could be built for them. Newton and Leibniz developed calculus long before it could be given proper axiomatic foundations. If a theory turns out to be unsupportable, science abandons it and moves on, scavenging any useful ideas. Maybe knowledge is more like a web than a building that strictly has to be built from the bottom up.
• kurthr 6y ago
  It's interesting, because I've always found (personally) that I didn't really understand any mathematics until it became a foundational tool for another form of math I needed to use. Although I took courses with proofs, they never really helped (I'm more engineer than mathematician). Notation is a huge help (and can be a hindrance) in grasping the So Addn<Multiply<Trig<Algebra<Calculus<ODE<PDE... unfortunately, I don't consider myself to have really learned PDEs although I can work with them. It's interesting to work with someone who CAN solve a novel PDE analytically, since their tool set is larger and they have real intuition.