/sci/ - Science & Math

>>14782235
No. It just means you werent really that talented to begin with if you couldnt take your contest math creativity into higher math. You just got really good at solving contest problem repetitively like a ML algorithm.

>>14782235
What? Mathematicians (at least prominent ones) are relatively underrepresented from math competitions. Overall however, the vast, overwhelming majority of mathematicians have masters to phds.

yes I experience this as well. The way the program is made is to make you learn x amount of theorems of algorithms and have you solve problems using those theorems. There is little emphasis on discovery by the student. We are expected to learn to prove such and such a theorem only using the following method: doA then assume lemma B then this shows C. If you payed money and spent 4 years doing this you wasted your time. You might have had fun doing it but you probably got almost no real mathematical skill out of it apart from being able to read math.

The upper echelon of any field is filled with creative and inquisitive people. That intelligence is what separates the wheat from the chaff.

>>14782261
>There is little emphasis on discovery by the student.
What is this lockharts lament shit. Discovery by student is just fine and it’s the point of homework assignments among other things. If you want the Moore method fine, but that is very intensive in general and not everyone is ready for it as an undergrad and you would probably just be making the same complaint anyway because you still dont get to be the first to invent the wheel

>>14782261
That was my experience. Went to a top 20 school, wanted to major in math. Get to my first proof based courses. If you ever ask "why" the answer is basically some version of step N follows because you've agreed that steps 1 through N - 1 were valid. You get zero insight on how you might have been able to come up with those theorems yourself. Felt so lonely that you're in a place where some of the smartest people in the country come to study and half the class is struggling with understanding the steps themselves while the other half does readily grasp the deductive chain but just doesn't care beyond the fact that it works. Maybe things were better at Caltech... I should have tried. Fuck, I had a chance but I was too much of a pussy to apply to that sausagefest.

>>14782403
>filtered by induction

>>14782403
No u did try but ur brain is giving u cope fuel because deep down u know ur a genetic midwit

>>14782403
in my experience the only people who make the switch to proof based math are former IMO contestants, univ won't teach you that, it's too late

No. Creativity is up there with patience and determination, as traits required to succeed.

>>14782403
>If you ever ask "why" the answer is basically some version of step N follows because you've agreed that steps 1 through N - 1 were valid. You get zero insight on how you might have been able to come up with those theorems yourself
That isn't the point. You are supposed to learn as much already discovered math up to now, have it crammed in your head, and use it to discover new math. Doesn't matter how they came up with every single theorem, and if you really cared about it its easy to look up on your own time without wasting time in the course. Go to grad school and start doing actual math by writing papers and tackling unsolved problems.
>>14782261
The only person that ever prevented you from doing undergrad research was yourself.

>>14782458
I did it.

>>14782597
Meh this is retarded Chinese study brain. You can get really good at math on material that's not that sophisticated. Once you have that skill, then you can target any math subject you need

>>14782403
If you don't start to catch on to how they come up with these proofs you probably don't do enough hard exercises on your own.

>>14782597
stop being so intense it's scaring off the chicks

>>14782235
>Do Math degrees destroy your creativity?
>Has anyone else experienced this?
No I haven't, quite the opposite, more math expanded my ability to express my thoughts in a rigorous manner.
>I think that the great majority of us come from a contest math background,
no, not for me at least, I always found context math boring and contrived, though perhaps this is why you feel your creativity dulled. I do worry that with standardized testing like the SAT II Math Level II going away the only way for math enthusiasts to distinguish themselves will be through these boring and contrived contests, letting a lot of people fall through the cracks that would have distinguished themselves in more conventional ways that were more conducive to knowing advanced topics well.

>>14782624
SAT II were a joke. A quarter of the people score a perfect 800. You gain nothing over an 800 on the regular math section. It's $50 spent for nothing but a chance to show colleges that you're a retard.

>>14782637
>SAT II were a joke. A quarter of the people score a perfect 800. You gain nothing over an 800 on the regular math section. It's $50 spent for nothing but a chance to show colleges that you're a retard.
Are you sure you're talking about SAT II Math II and not SAT II Math I? Anyway doesn't matter because the college board axed all of them because blacks.

(I got an 800 on them of course)

Contest math is a poor way to measure math ability though, but without the SAT II Math II there aren't many good other ways to demonstrate math ability

>>14782657
And anyway, it can't have been a good way to demonstrate math ability because I got an 800 on it, too and I had my math education crippled by a school board that chose mediocrity over excellence and adopted Core Plus as their curriculum.

>>14782667
>76 percentile --> 800
lmao I had no idea, glad I got an 800 then or I would have seemed like an absolute retard

>>14782667
>I had my math education crippled by a school board that chose mediocrity over excellence and adopted Core Plus as their curriculum.
I took mine back in 2004. You do have my sympathy. Things were different back then.

>>14782235
thank you for the thread OP. ive noticed a marked difference in attitudes between those whose first mathematical exposure was pre-uni and those afterwards towards what constitutes mathematical maturity. if you werent forced to generate the ideas preceding a proof and merely snapped together lego pieces to produce a result, then no creativity was exercised on your part. analysis while beautiful and powerful is not the proper context in which to develop a nimble intuition. geometry, combinatorics, and number theory are superior for this purpose.


A Radical Approach to Real Analysis - David Bressoud
The traditional course begins with a discussion of properties of the real numbers, moves on to continuity, then differentiability, integrability, sequences, and finally infinite series, culminating in a rigorous proof of the properties of Taylor series and perhaps even Fourier series. This is the right way to view analysis, but it is not the right way to teach it...
...There is an intentional emphasis on the mistakes that have been made. These highlight difficult conceptual points. That Cauchy had so much trouble proving the mean value theorem or coming to terms with the notion of uniform convergence should alert us to the fact that these-ideas are not easily assimilated. The student needs time with them. The highly refined proofs that we know today leave the mistaken impression that the road of discovery
in mathematics is straight and sure. It is not. Experimentation and misunderstanding have been essential components in the growth of mathematics.

>>14782723
pic related