Shame, math is some of the worst at this, everything is named after some guy, so there’s 0 semantic associativity, you either know exactly which Gaussian term they mean, or you are completely clueless even though they just mean noise with a normal distribution.
edit: Currently in a very inter-disciplinary field where the different mathematicians have their own language which has to be translated back into first software, then hardware. It’s so confusing at first till you spend 30 minutes on wikipedia to realize they’re just using an esoteric term to describe something you’ve used forever.
IT guy here, we suffer from a similar problem where everything is an acronym so it sounds like alphabet soup that if said as a word means sometimes you can’t even quietly go look it up later. You either nod along knowing what it means or nod along not knowing what it means but having no chance to learn without outing yourself.
And then you have multiple identical abbreviations meaning different things or different things that are pronounced the same or multi billion dollar ompanies naming their product after existing words (like Microsoft Word or Office or Outlook…).
Had a ticket about sports sites being blocked, college talked about how the change was IOC related. International Olympic Committee or Indicator of Compromise, you decide!
Trying to teach yourself higher math without a textbook is nearly impossible.
You could try just Googling all the Greek letters and symbols but have fun sifting through the hundred-odd uses of σ for the one that’s relevant to your context. And good fucking luck if it’s baked into an image.
The quickest way I’ve gotten an intuition for a lot of higher math things was seeing it implemented in a programming language.
I’ve been learning crypto math the hard way, it’s brutal.
I’ve found one way that works is to learn about the people, like learn about Gauss’s life and work, it helped give me context and perspective for the random terms.
Yeah, it can be really helpful to understand the context and the problems they were trying to solve.
Like for example, I think a lot of pop-sci talk about Special/General Relativity is missing huge chunks of context, because in reality, Einstein didn’t come up with these theories out of thin air. His breakthrough was creating a coherent framework out of decades of theoretical and experimental work from the scientists that came before him.
And the Einstein Field Equations really didn’t answer much on their own, they just posed more questions. It wasn’t until people started to find concrete solutions for them that we really understood just how powerful they were.
Gotta love Dirichlet boundary conditions (the function has to have this value), Neumann boundary conditions (the derivative has to have this value) and Cauchy boundary conditions (both).
On the other hand, there’s a bunch of things that are so abstract that it’s difficult to give them a descriptive name, like rings, magmas and weasels
Currently in a very inter-disciplinary field where the different mathematicians have their own language which has to be translated back into first software, then hardware. It’s so confusing at first till you spend 30 minutes on wikipedia to realize they’re just using an esoteric term to describe something you’ve used forever.
Yeah, this happens a lot. I studied math and I often got the impression that when you read other researcher’s work, they describe the exact same thing that you have already heard about, but in a vastly different language. I wonder how many re-inventions and re-namings there are of any concept simply because people can’t figure out that this thing has already been researched into. It really happens a lot, where 5 people discovered something, but gave them 5 different names.
I really like the naming of things after their discoverers/inventors.
I’m picturing a mathematician getting upset:
“How dare you speak about Friedrich Gauss like that. He dragged that universities astronomy department out of the stone age, even after the death of his first wife…”
The history of the people helps me with remembering the concepts.
Yeah, it’s an in-group exclusivity signifier.
Shame, math is some of the worst at this, everything is named after some guy, so there’s 0 semantic associativity, you either know exactly which Gaussian term they mean, or you are completely clueless even though they just mean noise with a normal distribution.
edit: Currently in a very inter-disciplinary field where the different mathematicians have their own language which has to be translated back into first software, then hardware. It’s so confusing at first till you spend 30 minutes on wikipedia to realize they’re just using an esoteric term to describe something you’ve used forever.
IT guy here, we suffer from a similar problem where everything is an acronym so it sounds like alphabet soup that if said as a word means sometimes you can’t even quietly go look it up later. You either nod along knowing what it means or nod along not knowing what it means but having no chance to learn without outing yourself.
And you can’t out yourself because, in many workplace cultures, the appearance of knowing is more important than actually knowing. :/
And then you have multiple identical abbreviations meaning different things or different things that are pronounced the same or multi billion dollar ompanies naming their product after existing words (like Microsoft Word or Office or Outlook…).
Mix in abbreviated customer names, names for servers and internal teams (no, not Microsoft Teams©) and everything is only an incomprehensible letter mumbo-jumbo.
Had a ticket about sports sites being blocked, college talked about how the change was IOC related. International Olympic Committee or Indicator of Compromise, you decide!
Trying to teach yourself higher math without a textbook is nearly impossible.
You could try just Googling all the Greek letters and symbols but have fun sifting through the hundred-odd uses of σ for the one that’s relevant to your context. And good fucking luck if it’s baked into an image.
The quickest way I’ve gotten an intuition for a lot of higher math things was seeing it implemented in a programming language.
I’ve been learning crypto math the hard way, it’s brutal.
I’ve found one way that works is to learn about the people, like learn about Gauss’s life and work, it helped give me context and perspective for the random terms.
Yeah, it can be really helpful to understand the context and the problems they were trying to solve.
Like for example, I think a lot of pop-sci talk about Special/General Relativity is missing huge chunks of context, because in reality, Einstein didn’t come up with these theories out of thin air. His breakthrough was creating a coherent framework out of decades of theoretical and experimental work from the scientists that came before him.
And the Einstein Field Equations really didn’t answer much on their own, they just posed more questions. It wasn’t until people started to find concrete solutions for them that we really understood just how powerful they were.
Gotta love Dirichlet boundary conditions (the function has to have this value), Neumann boundary conditions (the derivative has to have this value) and Cauchy boundary conditions (both).
On the other hand, there’s a bunch of things that are so abstract that it’s difficult to give them a descriptive name, like rings, magmas and weasels
Yeah, this happens a lot. I studied math and I often got the impression that when you read other researcher’s work, they describe the exact same thing that you have already heard about, but in a vastly different language. I wonder how many re-inventions and re-namings there are of any concept simply because people can’t figure out that this thing has already been researched into. It really happens a lot, where 5 people discovered something, but gave them 5 different names.
I really like the naming of things after their discoverers/inventors. I’m picturing a mathematician getting upset:
“How dare you speak about Friedrich Gauss like that. He dragged that universities astronomy department out of the stone age, even after the death of his first wife…”
The history of the people helps me with remembering the concepts.
Disclaimer: I am NOT a mathematician.