So much to say about this.<p>I absolutely refused to learn the times-table in school. Even to this day I struggle to add seven and eight. That one seems to confuse me every time. I think the long division algorithm is one of the most difficult things in mathematics, and they teach this to ten year olds! (or they did when i was ten.)<p>So, fast forward many years, and I started doing really well studying advanced mathematics in my undergrad. But somewhere along the line I hit a wall: most math textbooks are written ass-backwards for my brain. I really don&#x27;t get maths by looking at equations. It has taken another 20 some years to move beyond this, and to not be shy about being a disaster when it comes to algebra. Because when it&#x27;s about <i>shape</i> or <i>process</i> that is when I really start to move.<p>My research today is in theoretical quantum physics (finally doing my postgrad.) I&#x27;ve started to see that there are others like me out there: we often sound like nutjobs when talking about maths, because it&#x27;s all a confused mess internally. But somehow from the chaos miracles emerge. This is in contrast to the heavily-linear-thinking types: these people produce sparkling sentences one after another, but often get lost seeing the big picture. The &quot;nutjobs&quot; are a minority, and are so easily criticized. But I sure wish there were more of us doing this hard stuff.<p>One of my favourite math lessons in school occurred when I was about six years old. The teacher had some coloured shapes scattered across the floor, some yellow, some red, some triangles, some discs, etc. She placed a big hoop around all the yellow shapes, and another separate hoop around all the triangles. But there was a problem with this scheme: what to do about the yellow triangles? She let us all stew on this for a few moments, and then the magic happened. If you place one of the hoops overlapping the other, the yellow triangles could inhabit both hoops at the same time.