Why There Is No Hitchhiker’s Guide to Mathematics for Programmers
I think this goes beyond programmers and those who want to learn &quot;Mathematics&quot;: it can be frustrating to talk with someone who confuses equivalence and implication in everyday conversations; this inability to use proper, basic, logic seems to be too widespread.<p>I can relate to the funny part on notation. I&#x27;ve been fortunate enough to have an older sister who&#x27;s Algebraist and I remember when I was in primary school and I&#x27;d have a question, she&#x27;d explain on paper using different symbols than the ones I was using just to make sure I wasn&#x27;t a slave of notation.<p>She insisted I had to think in an &quot;abstract&quot; way (that&#x27;s precisely the word she used) and not be tied by what the letters are called, and only look at the relations between them and context. This one piece of advice served me well.<p>It&#x27;s also funny the author mentions Fermat&#x27;s Last Theorem because the first time I had heard of it, it was still called &quot;Conjecture de Fermat&quot; and I had read a piece on &quot;Science &amp; Vie&quot; on Andrew Wiles&#x27; proof and the fact there still was work to be done to see whether it was correct or not. I was 7 at the time and it seemed strange and amazing how something that can be stated in terms deceivingly simple even I could think I understood, can be so difficult to prove.<p>I&#x27;ve studied Electronics Engineering in college and we had really cool Maths courses (again, in the spirit of different notation, I noticed a peculiarity: in the U.S., the term &quot;Calculus&quot; is used, whilst we used &quot;Analysis&quot;, &quot;Introduction to Mathematical Analysis&quot;, &quot;Differential Analysis&quot;, etc. Perhaps the influence of French and Soviet Mathematicians who taught at my University. The books are also either Smirnov, Demidovich, Pontryagin, Piskunov, or Dieudonné, so the style taught is kind of different).<p>I digress. For me, it doesn&#x27;t matter. I love Mathematics. Not the way many people say they love it. It is something on my top list of things to do and I am self studying currently. Why? First, emotional reason: in retrospect, the happiest years of college where in the &quot;Common Core&quot; (two years of core knowledge (mainly Physics and Maths) every Engineering student goes through before choosing a specialty (except Computer Science students, they only do freshman and then CS). Maths (and Physics) bring me happiness in a way that is hard to describe.<p>The second reason is practical: when my Maths skills were somewhat sharp, I had no problem understanding other things, because I had the necessary tools to strip down the things and go at it where it was called for (for example, modulation with a transistor and using Taylor series for the current). I then turned utterly incompetent and let everything rust and I&#x27;m paying the price right now. I have graduated but the blade is dull and I can&#x27;t live with myself like that. I&#x27;ve come a long way, especially because I was clueless in time management and focusing my efforts and getting things done and I had to learn how to mitigate my proclivity to be all over the place. The one sure thing is that I&#x27;ll never let go. I may not become a great mathematician, but every day I am less incompetent than the day before it. The point is, as in everything else: people don&#x27;t learn because they lack the drive to do so, face the reality of sucking, learning the basics and fighting that embarrassing feeling of the inner voice that says &quot;shouldn&#x27;t you already know that stuff?&quot;.