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Comment by yareally | Hacker News Reader

After going through 7 or 8 advanced level math courses in college, I noticed there was a dissociation of interests between the teachers and many of their students (90% STEM).

Mathematicians might be interested in math because they enjoy math purely for what it is: abstract and theoretical. However, many scientists and engineers just what to know where what they're learning might be useful or applied somewhere in their career.

Even if one never uses it directly in their jobs, it's at least nice to know where it actually has an application so it's in the back of your head. I ended up having to look much of that up on my own, but after I did, I had way more interest in calculus and linear algebra than I did beforehand.

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I think you are on to something. I remember struggling in my math classes (Calculus 2 (Integral), Calculus 3 (Multivariable), and Differential Equations), but doing very well in the major courses that used the same math (Networks, Linear Systems, Electromagnetics, etc.). For me, presenting the math in the context of a concrete application made understanding the principles much easier.

> but doing very well in the major courses that used the same math

My school's EE department offered a few math classes (presumably because the EE professors were exasperated with the low level of understanding students were showing with important math concepts). The math classes I took from my Electrical Engineering professors were infinitely more valuable and interesting to me than the equivalent math classes I took from the Math department.

In my EE department math classes, I was encouraged to use any tools at my disposal to solve the problems (TI-89, Wolfram Alpha, Matlab, etc.), and the problems were always very real, so I knew exactly why I was learning what I was learning and how it applied to solving real problems.

In my Math department classes, we had to solve everything by hand, the professors were overly concerned with semantics, and the problems were often very abstract and hard to wrap your mind around.

Yeah, we weren't allowed to use graphing calculators in university Math Department courses either. However, Physics and Computer Science & Engineering courses it was okay to use them.

It was sort of strange though, you could take the same math courses at the local community college that allowed you to use a graphing calculator and transfer them to the university without an issue. I took a few there and enjoyed the classes much more, since they were taught by experienced teachers and not TAs.

To be fair math classes from MATH departments usually have only simple numeric calculations involved, the answer is usually small number fractions combined with pi/e/squareroot of 2 (actually half of time is just 0 or 1). The goal is to force you use identities and manipulate algebraic expressions instead of typing a long long formula into the calculator.

That is more representative of what I got in my engineering classes. The math classes used problems where it was easy to make non-obvious errors.

When I first took linear algebra, the class bored me to tears. It was presented in a dry, unimaginative way. I got an A, but basically rote-memorized everything and then promptly forgot it after the final exam.

Later on, when I started learning quantum mechanics, optimization, and machine learning, linear algebra suddenly became fascinating, and I signed up for a bunch of courses in it. The abstraction isn't what made me dislike the field the first time around; it was the unenthusiastic manner in which it was taught (largely by TAs).

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