Ask HN: Anybody do maths as a hobby?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14224446

by examcoffee • 9 years ago

48 19 9 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

How is your experience? Interests? Success to the point of professional maths community recognition?

I do maths as a hobby but I'm very visual/spatial thinker and not good at proofs/jargon. I've also made several math video games (supermathworld.com is the latest).

What I've found is that high interest and aptitude is not enough for community recognition. It seems like a pretty competitive thing, you have to do something significant like prove an unproven theorem to really get "recognition".

But why do you want recognition? Or is your goal just to have more fun?

fratlas2• 9 years ago

Any advice on a visual/spatial person's method to learn linear algebra? Specifically matrices and why transformations are important, not just how to perform them.

mathgenius• 9 years ago

Did you try the 3blue1brown videos ?

danielrangel• 9 years ago

Try these: http://www.mathblog.dk/great-library/linear-algebra/

Or this:

Gilbert Strang lectures on Linear Algebra (MIT): http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL49CF3715CB9EF31D

nradov• 9 years ago

Quite a few HN users participate in Project Euler. https://projecteuler.net

Johnny_Brahms• 9 years ago

406 and counting!

We have actually used similar problems (variations of the sub-100 problems that require only high school maths) as questions in our hiring process.

alixaxel• 9 years ago

I used to stay up nights in my teenage years doing math for fun and actually came up with two or three theorems by myself. What I found out was that all of my (previously) unknown unknowns were are actually very well known within the math community (Wilson's theorem, Fermat's little theorem, trailing zeroes in a factorial, ...).

it_can_be_done• 9 years ago

I use and study math in hobby projects. I started enjoying math when I found out that I can do cool things with it. It's been long journey because I lacked motivation when I was a kid.

EliRivers• 9 years ago

Certainly do. Decided about eight years ago, after fumbling with some integrals that I know I used to be able to handle, to get my maths skills back.

Being the sort of person that I am, I signed up for a Masters in Maths with the Open University. It was far more brutal than I had hoped. I'd call it a success in as much as five and a half years later I finished it. I'll never do any maths of interest or note to the professional maths community, but I hope they at least recognise the qualification :/

Exams are a kid's game, I learned; three hours in an exam hall with a brutal set of maths questions is physically exhausting as well as mentally. There were five of those. Fully five-sixths of the MMaths with the OU is (or was, when I did it) assessed purely on formal exams in big exam halls, which is the only way it can be, but it sure does pile on the pressure with the whole year's worth of study riding on those three hours.

It taught me how to pick up a thick, savage maths text book and learn from it, which is a really useful ability. It also taught me to hate with a vengeance textbooks and explanations that don't clearly define their terms, their operations and their ranges of applicability. I read Physics at university the first time round, which was short on computing lectures as you might expect, so my introduction to order notation was formal and mathematical; the last time someone asked me about it in an interview, they got diagrams, graphs, ranges of applicability, definitions, examples, a short diatribe about how using the symbol '=' was really unhelpful, the whole lot. Seemed to go well; when we got to the section on his "things to ask about" sheet marked "communication skills" he just put a tick in the box and said we could skip over it, so one unexpected benefit of maths as a hobby has been to force my own mathematical thinking into rigour, with a knock-on effect in technical communication.

How it works for me is probably not how it would work for everyone, and I learned it the hard way; grind. Hour after hour, evening after evening, weekend after weekend of just sitting at the table with the book, some pencils and pads of paper. Each time I'd be done for the day, I'd pick up and recycle the drifts of paper that had collected on the floor as I'd discarded each piece I didn't need anymore. It gets in you, sometimes. I'd sit down at lunchtime with a sandwich, thinking I'd just look at the next question to get a feel for it, and get up again six hours later having thrashed it to death, picked it apart, textbooks I didn't even remember fetching from the shelf open on the desk, and pages and pages around my feet containing my own handwriting that I also didn't remember writing. Each time I found something I just couldn't grasp, couldn't understand, I'd just push on. Sometimes I'd never get it, sometimes I'd come back to it twenty pages later and it would seem simple (and sometimes I'd rage at how poorly the author had explained it, which was probably fifty percent the thrashing of my dying ego).

I have genuinely described as "black magic" taking a converging infinite series, and by adding zero to it, making it converge faster. So much faster.

tonyedgecombe• 9 years ago

Interesting, I did my degree (in Maths) with the OU and have been pondering whether to do my masters.

usgroup2• 9 years ago

I had considered similarly but basically all of the masters modules are compulsory and not interesting to me. Fractal geometry anyone ?

dermybaby• 9 years ago

Thank you for writing this out. Your feelings mirror mine to a 't'. I have a Masters in EE from an American university and had to take 2 math classes [applied math I & II] to pass - boy was it a slog!

Long story short - sites like betterexplained.com have done a better job re-igniting my interest in math again.

Pardon me if you are someone famous that I should know - but you write well (not being glib/facetious). I didn't see a blog in your profile but I would read it were it to be featured.

JackMorgan• 9 years ago

I barely passed Calc 1 on my third try in university. Somehow I'd missed most of Algebra 2 and Trig in my unaccredited overseas high school.

Ten years later I decided to work my way through Kahn Academy from Calc 1 through Diff Eq after a colleague said I'd "never be able to understand" linear algebra. I bombed so many tests I got auto placed back into pre-algebra. So now I'm working through that a bit at a time, up to Algebra 2 :)

psyc• 9 years ago

I study math for fun. It's very mind-expanding. Inevitably, it feeds back into my work eventually, allowing me to conceive algorithms I would have struggled with or been unable to imagine.

gtani• 9 years ago

(answering a different question) A lot of people are deciding they need to get a solid grasp of linear algebra, calc up thru some real analysis/measure theory, convex optimization, probability theory so they can read deep learning/machine learning paper.

So there's meetups, study groups, subreddits to work thru different topics

Artlav• 9 years ago

Pure math? Not really.

Math as applied to some numeric solution or another? All the time.

I like building models and simulators, for stuff ranging from a space elevator to the sound of a supersonic rooster. I like making procedural generation models, from expanding a set of parameters into a realistic texture to making a whole universe from a single seed number.

This sort of stuff. It's more or less in the art category than anything practical.

solomatov• 9 years ago

Personally I am interested in logic, dependent types, homotopy type theory and category theory. I study them as a side project when I have time.

usgroup2• 9 years ago

There's some good stories of amateur becoming professors and more. E.g.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Pitts

Mind you I'd imagine it to be much easier if you just do that damned masters you've been planning to and go the PhD route.

Ask HN: Anybody do maths as a hobby?

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