Halo said Does abstraction and a focus on the theoretical/hypothetical not potentially aid your problem solving skills?

-snip-

Probably, but in a different way than what I'm thinking of. When I say that my critical thinking/problem solving skills increased, I'm talking more about situational affairs, and my ability to react to matters of the physical plane on the fly.

I learn mostly through connecting thoughts, experiences, and memories. I noticed when I was very young that even things that you wouldn't think had any connection with something else, surely derives from, impacts, or is somehow related to it. Living where I do though, I never had much of a social life, and even if I did it wouldn't be a pleasant one since people in my area discriminate against people with my last name, so most of my time was devoted to learning when I was young. I was constantly in a state of absorption. Sucking in all the information around me. Remembering random bits and pieces of things I heard, even if I wasn't trying to. Sometimes these sorts of, "micro-memories", come up out of the blue, and 90% of the time relate to either my mood, or what I was thinking about. A good example would be the word, "unfettered". Surely not a word you hear every day, but last week I was searching for a word similar to undeterred, and that word popped into my head. I don't remember where, or when I heard it, but something inside just told me that it was synonymous with the type of adjective I was searching for.

Anyway, basically I was living on auto-pilot all through grade school. I even learned to, "sense", people in the halls when I started to grow more reclusive, (like I just knew who they were by the unique movements they made, or something. My whole grade was only 80 people, so there weren't any people I didn't know walking around.), because I would always walk with my head down between 7th and 8th grade, and after a while I could just tell who was who. Once I hit the 11th grade, and went to a trade school for a few hours a day, I started maturing faster, and thinking about everything differently. It was like another dimension was added to my perception of life. The physical aspect, and the relation of things in that plane, instead of just being trapped in my mind with countless random thoughts, and formulas.

It's like a computer's RAM. If you run less programs, the RAM can allocate more space to specific tasks, but if you run more programs it's going to slow the others down.

Math is pretty cool, if you ask me. Personally, I rather like watching a math teacher carefully go through all the steps in a proof, because it's kinda like seeing a magic trick happen.

I'm also kind of a freak, in that I like to go look for really complicated stuff until I'm way in over my head. I like to mess around with numbers, just to check for patterns that emerge, when, for instance, you do some kind of weird thing with even numbers. just to see if anything interesting comes out of it. Not the most glamorous hobby, for sure. Programming helps with this, a ton, because then you can check a bunch of cases at once without going through so much tedium.

That said, that doesn't actually make me good at maths. I'm still rubbish at Analytic geometry, and still have a long way to go before I've got 1337 sk!11s in math as a whole. But it's easily worth it, because it's easy to find cases in real life where a mathematical/logical approach helps. If you're looking for them, I guess.

But yeah, that's really just my opinion.

Whoa, I saw this thread.

Being a college student majoring in maths and having participated in math olympiads before, I've seen and used math a lot. For me, I view maths as an amusing thing to learn, but unfortunately not many people could ever learn math to reach the "amusing" part before they suffer math anxiety. While many people got afraid with math and only see "one rule under your nose" math problems (that is, one that you memorize the formulas while not necessarily understanding what they mean), I was very fortunate to love math and to have seen math problems that require brilliant approaches and unconventional thought processes before solving them. I look at a mathematical work much like art-loving people looking at artworks; I could see the beauty of a mathematical work while mathophobic (is that a word) people wondered what the heck it was, much like art-loving people could see the beauty of an artwork while I wondered what the heck it was.

That being said, however, does not mean that I love and am good at everything math. Math itself consists of several subdisciplines, and I'm not an all-rounder. Inside the math department, people still hate some parts of math and love some others. I myself, for example, love combinatorics and algebra but hate statistics and differential equations (in my college, statistics is considered a part of mathematics). And in parts that I hate and am not good at, I give that "how the heck" reaction as well. Then I understood what happens. Many people "missed the link" between the math problem and the seemingly out of the blue formula to solve it.

I loved math in high school, enough so that when I went into uni I started out as a Mechanical Engineering major. Probably would've stuck with that but *god* did I ever hate the math department, and they didn't like me much either. I'd skip all the homework and sleep through more classes than I'm proud to admit, and ace all the tests. Then suddenly that wasn't good enough anymore (physics 201 was the turning point). "Fuzzy" departments seemed to respond better to that approach, so that's where I ended up.... Plus I cared more about human language than natural language. English was the bomb, Chinese was more fun, Japanese was the best (epic sensei).

But, despite all that, I still wound up taking a metric fuckton of math-based classes (including one in actual rocket science). Math is always going to be awesome. At its core, it's another language -- and if you don't like learning about it, look first to your teachers. Math is a simple language that doesn't convey beauty as easily as English. It's easy for people to get caught up in the grind, and lose the ambition towards higher purpose that math can (and should) carry with it.

When I can catch on to a math concept, I really like it. Otherwise, it feels like a really boring chore to chug through. I'm terrible at geometry(proofs and such. I fucking hate proofs), but I'm really good at most concepts of algebra and Trig sort of comes naturally to me. In my freshman and sophomore years of Highschool, I flunked my math classes. Mostly because I had formulas thrown in my face, without any explanation of WHY that formula does what it does, and how it works. I was mainly taught to plug in numbers. Without any pull to actually do my work, as I found the subjects being taught absolutely useless, I failed, obviously.