• Technus@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • InverseParallax@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • Technus@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        2 months ago

        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.