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Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

Because I get frustrated with people. I feel like they refuse to even attempt to understand. They say to themselves "I'm a visual learner" (everyone is) or they seek solace in groups when mathematical notation is difficult to understand. It's ok if I don't understand this, and I don't even have to try, because lots of other people don't get it either!

If even an idiot like me can understand mathematical notation, anyone can. In particular, if you're able to understand code, you can understand mathematics. I get frustrated with the mental barriers people set up for themselves when learning mathematics.

I think it may even be cultural. I have heard that in China, for example, they don't have this aversion to anything that looks mathematical.

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> Because I get frustrated with people. I feel like they refuse to even attempt to understand.

Many people do refuse to understand. My parents & grandparents do that about anything computer related at all, not to mention math. Lots of people, especially guitar players, avoid learning music notation. Most people gloss over anything in a foreign or technical vocabulary.

I agree with you, and I get frustrated too, and I like to dig into mathy stuff, and I also find myself glossing over things and refusing to "get it" only to discover later it wasn't that hard.

So: does it help to get frustrated? Aside from expressing incredulity, what can you do to help someone more easily understand, or get motivated to understand?

It seems like for at least a subset of people, calling it "easy" and making pictures really truly does help them understand it, and/or spend the time being willing to understand it. What's wrong with that?

> I think it may even be cultural.

It might. I'd buy that Asian students get more math and have a slightly lower aversion in general. But I also know older Asians that refuse to learn simple computer concepts exactly the same way my parents do, so on that anecdata alone, I'd speculate that refusing to learn things that seem foreign or technical is part of the human condition. I'd even guess that this is an evolutionary advantage, that our brains actively avoid hard to understand things because it uses too many of our limited cognitive resources.

> Because I get frustrated with people. I feel like they refuse to even attempt to understand. They say to themselves "I'm a visual learner" (everyone is) or they seek solace in groups when mathematical notation is difficult to understand. It's ok if I don't understand this, and I don't even have to try, because lots of other people don't get it either!

But surely attempting to convince someone who is afraid to learn a given piece of mathematics that it is actually within his or her comprehension is a good thing, not a bad? One need not convince a die-hard visual learner that he or she should give up learning that way, only that he or she can, and probably should, strive to learn how to convert mathematics into a more visual form?

(EDIT: I just noticed that dahart (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15362069) said much the same, and probably better.)

Incidentally, I think that I disagree with the statement that everyone is a visual learner. Without getting into the technical meaning of the term, if there is one, I believe that I don't learn by picturing images the way that I think people who say that they are visual learners believe that they are learning.

I'm quite certain you can understand a histogram a lot better than a long list of numbers, that a continuous function will make more sense if you're able to look at its graph, that you've doodled or scrawled on a board some sort of diagram to help you understand something.

We're not digital computers. We have a well-developed visual cortex and we have to use it in order to learn.

(-1)^S 1.M 2^(E-127) is the concept not the implementation and the implementation is the important part, especially as a programmer. The blog is mostly about the details. How the bits are allocated, how they influence precision, etc...

And exactly none of that is included in "(-1)^S 1.M 2^(E-127)"

But that's not what the blog post is about. Every other explanation of floating point numbers describes how bits are allocated. The visual part of this article is a drawing of the window and offset thing. Which in this case, is exactly what the expression is saying.

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