hardest

[Anonymous No.6995354]

What was the hardest subject in mathematics that you have ever encountered?

>inb4 everyone says number theory

[Anonymous No.6995356]

>>6995354
physics

[Anonymous No.6995358]

Geometric measure theory because I hate analysis but took it anyway for some reason.

[Anonymous No.6995359]

quadratic equations

[Anonymous No.6995361]

>>6995354
Nothing is hard if you put enough time into it.

[Anonymous No.6995369]

>>6995361
Fine. Which subject did you have to put the most time into, asshole?

[Anonymous No.6995380]

>>6995354
triple integrals

[Anonymous No.6995384]

solving for x

[Anonymous No.6995412]

>>6995361
>Nothing is hard if you put enough time into it.

brb putting enough time solving unsolved problems

[Anonymous No.6995418]

>>6995361
No, thing is hard because you don't like it.
> "Measure theory is hard!" says a number theorist
> "Abstract algebra is hard!" says a statistics
and so on

[Anonymous No.6995440]

>>6995384
Try solving for s sometime. It's worth a million dollars!

<span class="math">\zeta(s) = 0[/spoiler]

[Anonymous No.6995448]

dividing by zero

[Anonymous No.6995449]

>>6995440
<span class="math">s=\zeta^{-1}(0)[/spoiler]

[Anonymous No.6995463]

Physicist here

Differential Geometry is the day I realised I am not and will never be a mathematician.

[Anonymous No.6995465]

Principal connections and associated covariant derivatives.
I still can't wrap my head around the formalities involved. I'm doing it as a hobby but jeez...

[Anonymous No.6995470]

>>6995463
Read geometrical methods of mathematical physics by Schutz

[Anonymous No.6995472]

fundamentals of analysis. literally nothing made sense.

[Anonymous No.6995473]

>>6995361
I find all maths hard and im putting the time into.And when I say all maths I mean baisc maths like fractions,algebra simplification,lcm,hcf....

[Anonymous No.6995475]

>>6995473
Because you are still in high school. High school "maths" is absolute bullshit.

[Anonymous No.6995477]

Probability theory

I can't wrap my head around the Monty Hall paradox. I'm convinced the probability does not change and it should be 50/50.

[Anonymous No.6995485]

>>6995475

no im 25,been out of high school since 16.Back in college h doing gcse maths again now.Hard as fuck.

[Anonymous No.6995488]

>>6995477
Here we go.

Protip: instead of thinking 'in what occasions do I win?', think 'in what occasions do i loose?'. The answer is that you loose only if you choose the correct door at the beginning (1/3).

[Anonymous No.6995494]

>>6995488
But after Monty opened a door theirs only 2 doors left. The probability has to be 50/50.

[Anonymous No.6995504]

>>6995494
You have to consider the whole situation, not only that. Do you have MATLAB? I made a little script that simulates the problem. You can run it if you want and see that the probability of winning is 2/3 if you change doors.

[Anonymous No.6995508]

>>6995504
No, thanks. I don't run code from 4chan. Might be a virus or something. Also programming is not math. In math we prove things.

[Anonymous No.6995509]

The Variable

[Anonymous No.6995523]

>>6995472
ayy

[Anonymous No.6995529]

>>6995494
That's like saying, "a man either has hands or he doesn't. 50/50."

The host has more information than you. He gets rid of one knowing that it doesn't have the prize. If I'm holding more cards than you, I'm more likely to be holding an ace. Discarding ones that aren't aces doesn't change that; it could just mean I got rid of the ones that I didn't need.

[Anonymous No.6995532]

Didn't enjoy analysis much the first three times I took it in undergraduate courses (real I, II and complex) so I took the graduate level one to see if it got any better.

Nope, quite the mistake.

[Anonymous No.6995538]

>>6995529
>Discarding ones that aren't aces doesn't change that

By this logic opening a door shouldn't change the probabilities either. So there can't be one door more likely to win than the other, i.e. it cannot be 2/3 to 1/3, and switching cannot make your choice better.

[Anonymous No.6995540]

>>6995508

>In math we prove things

looks like that aint going so hot anon

[Anonymous No.6995541]

>>6995538
Opening a door DOESN'T change the probabilities. You have a 1/3 chance of being right before and a 1/3 chance of being right after.

[Anonymous No.6995546]

>>6995532
Actually on second thought I'm not sure if I found Galois theory more difficult or not the first time around.

[Anonymous No.6995548]

>>6995541
But it changes the other probability from 1/3 to 2/3. If the opened door contained a goat, then it had no chance of winning at the beginning, so it never had probability mass. Therefore the other door cannot gain 1/3 of probability mass

[Anonymous No.6995574]

>>6995548
You're ignoring the fact that the host knows more than you do. When the host opens a door, it reveals information about the door he didn't open (namely, that if you chose incorrectly, it must be behind the door he didn't open), but the decision reveals nothing about your door, so you're still stuck at 1/3.

[Anonymous No.6995579]

>>6995574
>it reveals information about the door he didn't open (namely, that if you chose incorrectly, it must be behind the door he didn't open)

But if I DID choose correctly then it will be behind the door I chose. So the probability should be 50/50 again.

[Anonymous No.6995587]

>>6995579
Actually, if you chose correctly, you have a 100% chance of being right. Too bad you only choose correctly 1/3 of the time.

[Anonymous No.6995617]

Probably measure theory and point set topology. This is considered babby-tier math to some people here, but it was a nightmare for me and I'm a grad math student.

I received A's in both classes, but I hated it. I felt as if I had to develop or come up with random set theoretic ideas and just 'know' things that were apparently very easy or trivial.

For many of the proofs, even the ones I devised, they were done from just cleverness -- there was nothing insightful gained from these proofs, it was just cleverness. It was clever to see a set fulfilled a property in accordance with some other set by taking their intersection, finding their complement or whatever, then analyzing that. I got tired of DeMorgan's laws being spammed constantly and trying new combinations of it.

I didn't even give a shit anymore by the finals. I did well on them, both finals, but I wasn't even ecstatic. Just relieved it was over. It was the very definition of masturbatory mathematics and I saw no point in all of that shit, and this is coming from someone who heavily enjoyed his set theory grad course.

Couldn't stand those classes.

[Anonymous No.6995621]

>>6995449
lol'd

[Anonymous No.6995639]

[Anonymous No.6995930]

Easy way to see the Monty Hall problem:

Imagine 100 doors. You pick one. The host opens 98 incorrect ones. Do you switch your door?

Of course, because the chance you originally picked the correct one was 1/100. Now it's been narrowed down to one other choice and the one you originally picked, whose probability doesn't change. So switching gives you 99/100 chance.

[Anonymous No.6995941]

>>6995639
lel nice meme

[Anonymous No.6997983]

>>6995418
That must be why nobody has proved or disproved the Riemann Hypothesis yet. That's because everyone dislikes the Riemann Hypothesis.

>>6995354
The first in Measure theory/Integration I had wasn't so easy. Number theory (sorry) and Geometry in first year of grad school were hard, but that's also because I had picked a lot of subjects and had little time to work on those.

Ultimately the difficulty didn't depend so much on the subject as it depended on the exercises and/or the teacher.

[Anonymous No.6997994]

Fucking spectral theories.

[Anonymous No.6997998]

I am so freaking happy that I'm not the only one here that sucks at analysis. I'll be great at it one day! I know I will.

[Anonymous No.6998000]

>>6997994

*theory

[Anonymous No.6998040]

I'm taking Elementary Analysis this semester and I'm kinda nervous after hearing everyone say that it's hard as shit.

What should I expect?

[Anonymous No.6998052]

>>6998040
Lots of calculation. Lots of results that will might confusing at first but will appear somehow intuitive geometrically (if you draw them). Lots of picky conditions for the theorem to be true.

All in all, it's fun, but you have to be careful and persistent.

[Anonymous No.6998057]

Differential Equations I guess. I think I just had bad luck with the class though.

[Anonymous No.6998081]

>>6995504
did you take physics at UMASS Amherst?

[Anonymous No.6998089]

numerical analysis
linear programming

so many math majors are absolute shit at actually doing something useful with math; writing a program to solve something. real math is done on a computer, if you want a real job

[Anonymous No.6998117]

I don't think any part of math is really hard in and of itself, there's just so many fucking new pieces of jargon that I have to learn for every subject that it's hard to convince myself to learn it. Like what the fuck is a homotopy

[Anonymous No.6998194]

>>6995380
>multi
>hard

[Anonymous No.6998300]

>>6995354
Pre-Algebre. Shit was tough.

[Anonymous No.6998313]

Either Pre-Calc or something math 091/092
>Pre-Calc they expected students to sit there and pound through tables and tables of trig identities perfectly (HAWKES system)
>091 instead of, you know, introducing students to numbers and making them numerate, wanted students to memorize and identify real numbers, whole numbers, transcendentals, irrational, rational, counting, integers, all in one problem
>092, introduce students to graphing
>don't show them a graph until they're like 2 chapters in y=mx+b
>don't even bring in the concept of coordinating a shape and translating/rotating/scaling
A class for a friend instructor of mine had 2/3rds of the students drop by the end of the semester for introductory Stats (out of 32). Only half of those that remained were A students. The new system they're trying to push just destroys students and makes them pure shit at math.

One of the Pre-Calc problems I went through a student with was "simplify" cos(8x). No reason, just do it. They didn't teach students algebraic long division either for more than one section, synthetic division was used for like 5 sections.

[Anonymous No.6998342]

>>6998040
idk everyone says it's the hardest undergrad math class at my uni, and it was pretty fucking easy for me, got an A+ last semester. I hard to work a lot at it, but it was reasonable and I don't think we really covered so many topics that it was easy to get left behind.

[Anonymous No.6998380]

Let's see... let me rank all the classes I have taken from hardest to easiest:

Number Theory
Linear Algebra (rigorous, not first year)
Real Analysis
ODE
Topology
Complex Analysis
Ring Theory
Vector Calculus
Cryptography
Group Theory
Multivariate calculus
Calculus 2
Calculus

[Anonymous No.6998389]

>>6998380
Number theory is that difficult to people eh? I'm taking it next semester. Number theory seems cool as fuck and I'm really excited for it, even if it's hard.

[Anonymous No.6998392]

Discrete mathematics was really, really annoying.

Wasn't hard, just annoying to the degree that I stopped caring.
>>6995475
In America, sure.

[Anonymous No.6998398]

I'm taking topology this semester but literally Algebra 2 was the hardest math class I've ever taken. I got a B in that class in 7th grade and I've gotten As in every other math class I've ever taken.

[Anonymous No.6998406]

>>6998392
>in comp sci
>tfw dread discrete mathematics, which I'm going to be taking soon

[Anonymous No.6998413]

>>6998406
Discrete mathematics is easy, it's just pedantic and tedious.

[Anonymous No.6998420]

>>6998413
What do you mean?

[Anonymous No.6998429]

>>6998420
It isn't interesting beyond the novelty behind it, there are no satisfying realizations.

Just bullshit to work through.

[Anonymous No.6998430]

Measure theory. I still don't know which way Fatou's lemma goes. There's no geometric intuition for me, I need a picture I can look at.

[Anonymous No.6998436]

>>6998389
Number theory isn't difficult for people... it's a difficult subject, period.
The easiest number theoretic questions are some of the hardest math problems there are. I'd say that in general, number theory problems are the hardest.
There's a reason Gauss said number theory was the queen of mathematics. Many professors today say number theory is "real math". At least at my school.

Don't get me wrong - number theory is a beautiful field of math, and it is fun as fuck. But it is very, very difficult.

[Anonymous No.6998461]

>>6998436
At least the course I'm taking is taught by a professor that studies number theory. The class set up seems interesting; the focus is on labs and apparently he sets them up so that the students try to actually come up with the important theorems (and of course prove them) themselves, instead of teaching the important theorems and then using them. This prof has also done a lot of work in the math ed sector, so I'm curious to see how well this type of course teaches the material Luckily I'm only taking one other serious mathematics course next semester along with it, should be able to cope.