I Have A Bunch Of Followers And Mutuals That I Never Even Talked To And I Know Some Of You Guys Are Very

yes, this, but also among other stem courses in a typical school, math is taken the most seriously. idk about other countries, but in poland in highschool people study chemistry, biology, physics and geography only if they decide to take the advanced final exams in these subjects. with math, everyone has take the standard level exam, so it can't be ignored like other subjects

up to highschool everyone has to complete their share of stem courses, but with the subjects other than math, the teachers often allow students to pass by memorizing the theory or by making some extra projects to earn points. with math you can't do that. when someone struggles with physics, the teacher sometimes says "alright, next year you won't have to study physics, so just learn those formulas and definitions and write them down on a test and I will let you pass". in math this is not an option, the student will have to take n more years of math courses

also, math mainly requires learning new skills, not just new information. many people never memorize the "dry theory" in highschool, because you have access to a reference table of formulas during exams and your job is only to know where to use those formulas – no need to memorize anything. but this does not come naturally to everyone and I think a huge part of the problem is teaching people how to work on their problem solving skills. I tutored a few students who believed they were bad at math and their mindset was "I can solve this type of problem because I know how to substitute into this formula, but when the problem is slightly different I panic, because the teacher never showed us how to solve it", which can be fixed by practicing a wider variety of problems and practicing the awareness of one's thinking process

people do not understand that problem solving is a skill on its own and I blame schools for that, because what we are offered is the image of math being about re-using the same kind of thinking processes but with different numbers. heck, when I was in elementary school I thought this is what math is about and I hated it because it's so boring and repetitive. I can imagine, when someone believes that this is what math is supposed to be and then they see the "more real math", which is about creativity, they panic (and rightfully so, they've been lied to)

my unpopular opinion is that not everyone can be good at this, just like I will never be good at understanding literature – my brain just sucks at processing this kind of stuff and I have aphantasia which doesn't help at all. but what makes it even worse for those people is the belief that it should be about repeating the same patterns over and over, so when they see that it's something completely different, it must be very frustrating – the reality is inconsistent with their beliefs

I am sure it doesn't cover the entirety of the "oof I always hated math" phenomenon, but it certainly does explain some of it, especially in the context of the education system in my country

As I said in a previous post, I have deep sympathy for the frustration of people who are good at math when they see math so almost universally hated by children and adults

And again and again, they try to explain that math is very much within everyone's reach and can be fun and, at least in western countries, education was to blame, messing up this very doable and fun thing by teaching it wrong

But I still gotta wonder - why math? If it is really just education messing this up, why does it mess up so much with math, specifically? I'm sorry but I still cannot shake the sense that even if it's just bad teaching, math is especially vulnerable to bad teaching.

Or is it maybe just that math is the only truly exact science, so there is no margin of error, so unlike every other field where you can sortof weasel around and get away with teaching and retaining half-truths and oversimplifications and purely personal opinions, math is unforgiving with the vague and the incorrect?

The Washington Post's Mensa Invitational invited readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.

Here are the winners:

29 X 2022

another exhausting week finally over! fortunately I have two extra weekend days, so I can rest and do my homework without stressing over it

I found another promising youtube channel about learning. and "insanely difficult subjects" sounds about right when it comes to everything that's happening in math

I wish there was more content about learning math specifically. the tips I see, however good and useful for studying memory-based stuff such as biology or history, don't seem to work for math

for now my best method is to study the theory from the textbook, trying to prove everything on my own or if that fails, working through the proofs, coming up with examples of objects and asking (possibly dumb) questions that I then try to answer. afterwards I proceed to solving exercises

recently I've been studying mainly commutative algebra, in particular the localization

we didn't spend much time discussing local rings so I had to find some useful properties on my own. the whole idea of "local properties" is an interesting one and I definitely want to read more about it

I find it to be much more elegant to study localization through its universal property and exact sequences rather than through calculation on elements. it's funny how you can cheat so many of our homework problems by knowing basics of category theory and a little bit of homological algebra

I wonder if it's possible to learn math using mind maps, never actually tried. here is my attempt at doing that for one of the subjects in complex analysis:

other than studying I had to prepare a presentation for one of my courses

the topics were given to us by the professor so I thought it would be boring and technical, but I got lucky to discuss the possible generalizations of the Jordan theorem

now I'm gonna talk about something more personal

this week has been difficult because my brain doesn't enjoy existing. some days I had so many meltdowns and shutdowns, I could barely think and speak, let alone study difficult subjects in math. it's really disappointing, as I thought it got better after introducing new medication, but apparently I still can't handle time pressure and I break very easily when emotions become overwhelming (which they frequently do). one of the most discouraging parts of a neurodivergent brain is that you can't always say "alright then I'll just work harder" when you see that the situation requires it. you can't, because your brain has a certain threshold of "how much can you take before you snap" and no tips for studying when you're tired can change that. if you try, you'll just have a meltdown and your day is over, the rest of it must be spent regaining your strength and all you can do is hoping that tomorrow will be better

I wish I could always simply enjoy math and see it as an escape route from a confusing world of human interaction and unpredictable emotions, but whenever there is a deadline or grading criteria, I can hardly enjoy it anymore. I know that this is not what it's always gonna be, the further I go the less deadlines and exams we have, so I must wait and one day it might be okey

since june I've been trying to discuss accommodations regarding adhd and autism with my university but the process takes forever and I'm slowly losing hope that I will ever have it easier

nonetheless, I'm willing to do everything to achieve the goal of spending my days alone working on developing some new theory. just a few more years and I might start living the dream

chaotic good

Pro-tip: You can use paper twice if you take your notes in pencil first and then write over it in pen. 

@shitstudyblr please validate me

6 VIII 2021

went back home

sleep: good, finally, although it's already almost 3 and i'm still up so i gotta go be unconscious for a few hours soon

concentration: fine

phone time: fine

did some measure theory, only this today and i'm in love, shit's fucking amazing

tomorrow i'll probably do more measure theory and possibly some coding

30 VIII 2023

aight it's been a while, time for an update

recently I've been doing mostly algebraic geometry, my advisor gave me some stuff to read, so I'm working through that. the goal is to familiarize myself with hilbert schemes – the topic is advanced, so there are many prerequisites coming up when I'm trying to read the book, that's kinda annoying

we are planning for my thesis to be about a certain generalization of the hilbert scheme, so basically the question is "investigate this space" and I've been having second thoughts whether I'm up for the challenge. I'm just getting to know how all that stuff works, so it's quite overwhelming to see how much I need to learn before I can do anything on my own

nevertheless, I'm pushing through as I will have to learn all of that anyway

I am working on finishing the proof from my bsc thesis and honestly I'm kinda losing hope lmao it turns out that what I probably have to do to complete it is a massive amount of extra reading and an even bigger amount of proving lemmas. the thing is that my work is about something like a generalization of results that have been proven by two people (one of which is khovanov, yes, that khovanov) and I feel it in my balls that the case I'm working on should be treated in a similar way. now the problem is that I can barely understand what they wrote for the "easier" case and I just can't see myself doing that for the more complicated one. oh and for my case I should probably use equivariant cohomology. but all I know about it is the definition, I have never even calculated anything for that + I will do a course on it this semester so it feels futile to study it now. idk I need to talk to my former advisor about this and ask him to be honest, does he even believe that this can be done?

other than that I'm applying for a scholarship. I don't think I will get it, but it is worth trying

I moved in with my boyfriend and our cat decided that my desk is way too big for one person, so now it's our desk

uni starts in a month so I should probably spend that time doing something other than math, which I will be doing all the time once uni starts, but I struggle with coming up with things to do that are not math-related. I should complete some tasks for work, but I would also like to have a hobby

there is a number of things that I could try, for instance reading, drawing, singing, grinding metas for geoguessr (apparently I'm a gamer now), but I can't commit to any of those, my interest comes in waves

maybe I could schedule about an hour per day to do one of those things so that my brain gets used to it. it is not like I can focus on math 24/7, I need to take breaks and I have days when my motivation is zero, so I just sit at my desk and watch stupid shit on youtube. but that's the point, days like that could be spent doing something meaningful and refreshing, instead I just procrastinate math lol

25 XI 2022

I neglected this blog a little, a lot is going on right now

I have a lot of work and I'm barely keeping up, I was sick for two weeks because not going to school would result in even more problems, so the cold didn't want to go away. I'm fine now but the lack of sleep is still fucking with my cognitive performance and I'm in general very exhausted both physically and mentally

today I had a meeting with the dean to talk about the accommodations for adhd and asd and it went very well, he is such a nice guy. we discussed extended time on tests, getting more specific instructions from professors and just a bit of extra care so I don't get overwhelmed. we also talked about a mentor who would help me with organizing my studying and the dean said that he will find someone who would help me with progressing in my field of interest, which sounds very promising. I don't know yet what that's gonna be, maybe algebraic topology, maybe something leaning more towards algebraic geometry, we'll see

when it comes to what I'm doing right now, we did some more stuff from homological algebra (projective and injective objects, derived functors and group homology) and the topics from commutative algebra have more geometric motivations, so the course becomes more and more enjoyable. learning complex analysis is much easier than those two other courses because there is significantly less theory and even if the problems are super difficult, it doesn't require as much brain power

other than doing homework I'm trying to find some time to read Introduction to Differential Topology by Jänich, although recently time is a scarce resource. the book is great tho

I'm glad I never encoutered anyone with such serious mindset while I was studying programming because now I wouldn't have as much fun writing branchless things in python, which is completely useless in highlevel languages but I just can't resist

I feel like some people are too serious with learning how to program. “I gotta be the best in this and that and build this and that to impress this employer” blah blah, that kills the fun out of programming. I see a lot of people (bashing people on Twitter again and actually a few people on here too, oops) making programming such a serious topic and you can’t have fun in it. Besides the proper syntax, documentation, best practises whatever, people in the tech community have putting up “rules” about how you should program and what to learn and if you fall out of that, you get ridiculed for it. Literally making it less fun.

Someone said that there’s no point in learning jQuery because JavaScript alone can do all that jQuery can and more.

So? I’m still going to learn it for fun? I’m having a blast with SCSS and jQuery, I don’t care 🤷🏾‍♀️ and I’ll learn the other frameworks and libraries that suits me because I want to. I don’t care if the entire tech community stops using a technology - if it interests me, I’m still going to learn it~!

Also no hate or anything to that person who said that to me - I completely understand your POV on jQuery! 💗✨ When I first read comment, I was a bit down like “oh what’s the point then…” but slapped myself and was like “I’m not learning for them or anyone. This library is cool and I like it so I’m still gonna use it”

Moral of the story: just do you. Do what makes you happy, code what you happy. Don’t be so serious all the time and make stupid dumb programs or games or websites whatever. Have fun in such a hard subject!!!

Real estate agent, 5 minutes into the meeting with a topologist: So, when you were talking about "contracting" a "house with two rooms",

21 VII 2023

oh god I haven't posted anything personal in a very long time

I've been super busy with exams, essays and then my thesis, all I did was sleeping and studying

I defended my thesis 40 minutes ago! it's done! in two months I am starting the master's degree program

this was probably the most brutal exam session I ever had lol it started a month ago and I had no day off since. after finishing my normal exams I've been working 12 hours per day to complete my thesis and thanks to my advisor who was working just as hard as me, we did it

I was so close to failing differential geometry. the exam was really bad, probably my worst ever. the questions were mostly about this one topic covered during the last class – we discussed maybe 3 problems and the professor decided that this is good enough lol basically we were supposed to read his mind and guess what else there is to learn. I scored 35% and apparently that's more than enough to pass – the grades go from 3 to 5 and I got 3.5, so that's literally "more than enough to pass". there were only 3 people who scored 50% or more, so yeah, that seems fair

that week of studying differential geometry was the most stressful week in the last 3 years, I fucking hate it when it's unclear what I'm supposed to learn and I have no idea how to do it. thank god I passed, I don't know how I would do it again before taking the september exam

anyway, I passed algebraic topology, number theory and algebra 2 with flying colors and the reviewers really loved my thesis! they strongly suggest publishing it, but I think I will try to finish the second part of the proof before I do that

I already found the advisor for my master's thesis, of course I don't know what it's gonna be about, but since I had some algebraic topology this year, I am thinking it's time to learn algebraic geometry now

sweet jesus it's finally over, I can't believe it. and something new is starting