Anonymous at Wed, 10 Jul 2024 19:09:39 UTC No. 16276328

Slow and steady wins the race. I'm learning basic undergrad math at 35. No ambitions to compete with child prodigies. Just having fun.

Anonymous at Wed, 10 Jul 2024 19:44:10 UTC No. 16276383

>>16276245
> filtered by a standard diff eq course

"not building necessary foundational math skills" doesn't describe the half of it. idly watching khan academy lectures does not a competent math student make.

the difference between the speed run kids who do well and those who don't is honestly community. anything intrinsic to them contributes a small bit to their accomplishments until probably the postgraduate level. maybe even past that. i took a 600-level algebra course as a sophomore with two other guys in my year. one of them was a nepo baby jeet whose parents were math profs at the university, and the other one was an unwashed white kid whose entire personality was a fourier transform shirt he wore three days a week.

nepo baby jeet had received essentially tailored tutoring from childhood and i myself was raised around plenty of stem professionals, whereas white boy came from basically bumpkinville and stood no chance whatsoever. it was 100% because of nurture, not nature. say what you will about american individualism but there's no argument for it at the highest levels of performance.

Anonymous at Wed, 10 Jul 2024 19:47:31 UTC No. 16276388

>>16276383
this is true because motivation is rarely, if ever, intrinsic

Anonymous at Wed, 10 Jul 2024 20:01:25 UTC No. 16276407

>>16276245
the problem with child prodigies is that they often become arrogant, and their entire personality becomes how they know "more math" than everyone else. Terry Tao does pure math, not applied math. He'd be very good at something like set theory, but even he can't find a closed form solution for the navier stokes equations. Once you reach a certain level in math, the idea of "knowing more" than everyone else tapers off since you reach the cutting edge of the field. Learning what someone else did is very different from discovering it yourself. The kids who do well in Diff Eq are those who know it's going to be colossally difficult. The prodigies aren't used to not being the smartest in the room.

Stop guessing start learning at Wed, 10 Jul 2024 20:13:37 UTC No. 16276440

>>16276245
People lie and make stories up all the time you cannot take anything anyone says at face value

Anonymous at Wed, 10 Jul 2024 20:14:48 UTC No. 16276445

>>16276328
lol it's so beyond over for you

Anonymous at Wed, 10 Jul 2024 20:14:57 UTC No. 16276446

There is something to be said for natural ability, but for most people who overwork they will eventually hit the wall

Anonymous at Wed, 10 Jul 2024 20:25:32 UTC No. 16276467

>>16276388
most people are just fucking lazy and not that interested in math to begin with. Those who commited much to math also did hardly anything besides that. There are tons of pseuds who sign up for these courses because they care more about prestige and public status than math itself and they, luckily, end up nowhere near a research position. Grothendieck is the perfect example of this: an extremely influential figure in math that worked his ass off. He gained a following but basically never got to enjoy it, much less so in his prime where he'd work 18 hours a day. People like Terry Tao who seems to be every indian student's idol all while putting out fine research are absolutely the exception. And then there are frauds like Eric Weinstein that do no research whatsoever but go on countless podcasts, desperately attempting to self-insert in some personal feuds with the leading physicists like Edward Witten to make the public perceive them as much more important than they really are

Anonymous at Wed, 10 Jul 2024 20:34:18 UTC No. 16276479

>>16276445
His goals may not be to do something STEM research-related though. He may just like doing it as a hobby? What is wrong with that? Some people have video games, some watch sports, etc. For me I things that catch my interest and then hop on to the next thing. I don't represent myself as a programmer or qualified to work at google or something.

Anonymous at Wed, 10 Jul 2024 20:35:19 UTC No. 16276481

>>16276479
program things that catch my interest*

Anonymous at Wed, 10 Jul 2024 20:36:22 UTC No. 16276485

>>16276479
ask me how i know you've never had a girlfriend

Anonymous at Wed, 10 Jul 2024 20:38:04 UTC No. 16276487

>>16276485
But I have had girlfriends? I just don't see the harm in someone learning math for fun just as I really don't see what is wrong with my own hobby of putting dumb shit on github.

Anonymous at Wed, 10 Jul 2024 20:53:54 UTC No. 16276510

>>16276245
In my uni something similar happens but I don't think it is about crashing and burning it is more about having no clue what to expect from a modern math curriculum. A lot of students who went to the IMO or at least to a national Olympiad, really have difficult with math that isn't "problem solving" and can have a lot of difficulties with building the foundations they need to do well in advanced subjects.

Anonymous at Wed, 10 Jul 2024 22:43:03 UTC No. 16276652

>>16276383
this is true because of global competition at the grad school level and because we're not in the 1950s anymore, however
>>16276467
this is true as well

I've met so many STEMmers who unironically hate what they do and are either in it for prestige or for the careerism. For some positions, the bar isn't set very high and employers will take in the person they can get along with the most and do the job as opposed to the overqualified autism who demands they have their own personal fridge and 30% more salary.

Anonymous at Thu, 11 Jul 2024 13:43:09 UTC No. 16277296

>>16276485
it's because you are a turbovirgin and think that in order to get laid you need to spend your free time watching marvel movies?

Anonymous at Thu, 11 Jul 2024 16:21:13 UTC No. 16277471

>>16276245
They crash and burn because they're used to stuff coming to them easily and when it doesn't they don't know how to deal with it emotionally.

Anonymous at Fri, 12 Jul 2024 04:56:43 UTC No. 16278234

>>16277471
This is very true, they unironically think the hardest thing in the world is trigonometric substitution to evaluate indefinite integrals, but when they take their first Linear Algebra course and don't even know how to determine if a trivial subset is a subspace then they just switch to Accounting or Data Science.

They never liked Math anyway, so it isn't that big of a deal, and they'll end up working somewhere okay anyway.