How can I be obsessed with Math????

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Now I'm going to college and going to take an engineering course, but I don't think my number skills are not good. I'm so different from any aspies because they're all seem to be good in math. So is there a way to be obsessed with math and stop my obsessions with tv series and video games???

Mathematics as taught in school is usually not very inspirational. Have you heard of the four colour problem, Goldbach's conjecture, Fermat's Last Theorem and things like that? If so, what do you think of them?

havent heard any from those//

Hi, according to Temple Grandin, there are three types of people on the Spectrum:

math and abstract thinking,

thinking in pictures (like Temple), and

story / narrative / language arts.

(with some overlap of course)



Now, I'm the story / narrative type, and I tend to get either an A or a F in math classes. If I'm able to put the time in to translate it into a story, I tend to do very well. And part of being able to do this, it helps to be in a pretty good place in my life, and it helps if the topic whets my appetite and means something to me. If I can describe in story what the graph does, I usually do pretty well. And Einstein himself may have possibly been a story type of Aspie, imagining what it's like to ride the front of a light beam, etc.

And for college, I really think pre-studying is the royal road. I mean, pre-studying is so effective it's almost cheating, just an entirely legal form of cheating! And more seriously, a professional engineer attending a seminar on, say, bridge safety, with a little bit of pre-study, he or she will get a lot more out of it.

If you like video games, it might help to practice math in a context where you can earn points and badges such as you can do at Kahn Academy. Make it a game.

https://www.khanacademy.org/

The other thing is that people who think they are 'not good at math' usually have gaps in their math solving skills. Math is actually fun if you feel confident about how to solve a problem.

Do some research on the works of Euler, Gauss and Ramanujin. If they do not inspire you, then you are not likely to be inspired.

ruveyn

I'm terrible at math. I did great at langauge arts, though. I even have trouble with division.lolEven something so simple like time, I have to kind of draw it so I can understand it. Anything with numbers, I'm completely lost. The only way is if I can see it, then I can make some sense of it.

HOW DARE YOU break the stereotype!

We are all under orders to be clones of either Rainman, or clones of Sheldon Leonard on the Big Bang Theory TV sitcom!
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But seriously-lay off the video games,and try your hand at desiging your own simulation games on paper.

Never played a video game in my life, but I have designed war games that employ moveable pieces representing army units, or naval warships. And used my own tables and dice to dertemine accuracy and armor penetration etc. And that got me turned on to mathematics.

You might lay off the Xbox and try designing simulations of your own on paper (not necessarily combat) of say...racing yacths-: how does making the boat bigger effect its speed? The sail area? Narrowness of the hull. And so forth. This might cause you to start hungering to learn calculus. Just a thought. Maybe somekind of fantasy baseball/football thing might turn you on. Look up batting averages and other stats, and create anachronistic ideal baseball teams manned by MVPs from differing generations ( Put Ty Cobb, Hank Aaron, and Jackie Robinson on one team, and put the Babe, Mickey Mantel, and Sammy Sosa, on another) and see which fantasy team wins your own fantasy world series.

This might force you to study probability theory (so you know how to set up tables for die throws), and so forth.

Create stories that force you to delve into mathmatics.

(2x)/(x+1)=5

If you can solve that for x, you can do 80% of the math required in undergraduate engineering courses (the vast majority of the actual math in engineering is simple algebra once you figure out what's going on; differentiation/integration are most of the other 20%)

Answer = (-5/3). Strangely, I did that in my head, so it is probably wrong.

Is Dhp correct?

According to my calculator, yes. I was able to go through the equation too, but it took me quite a while to get the right answer. (My math skills are rusty.)
They're is something I don't get, if a(b+c)=ab+ac, then why a/(b+c)=a/b+a/c don't work?

There is no reason why a(b+c)=ab+ac should imply a/(b+c)=a/b+a/c. Try b=1, c=1. The LHS is half of a, the RHS is twice a.

Last edited by isometry on 17 Jun 2013, 10:49 am, edited 2 times in total.

Very simple: 1/(a+b) is not = 1/a + 1/b.

1/a + 1/b = (b + a)/a*b and NOT 1/(a + b)



Next question?

So (2x)/(x+1)=5? If you can't solve that then you basically have no math skills whatsoever and I wonder what you've been doing in school, no offense. Just make that RHS 5/1 and imagine "the magic cross" to rewrite it. Personally I use such a cross picture as a way to turn around a division to a multiplication in an algebraic formula..
So

(2x)/(x+1) = 5/1
2x*1 = 5(x+1)
2x = 5x + 5
-3x = 5
x = your answer

Why a(b/c) is not equal to a/b + a/c has to do with (~can be proven by the notion that) a/b is NOT the same as b/a, where in contrast for multiplication it holds that a*b = b*a which is called the commutativity of the operator. Your question has to do with the distributive property of the division operator, which tells the rules of distribution in situations such as yours.
To try to explain it easily and for an easy way to remember/remind yourself: use actual easy numbers and question;
Is 1(2/3) = 1/2 + 1/3? Clearly, 2/3 is LESS than a half plus one third, because it is exactly only one third plus one third.

By the way my experience with technical university was that there was way, and way more that you must be able to understand and grasp than just above cores (this might be 80% in MID-school, but 5-10% later on. Or you might be calling on the sameness of nature of these simpler equations.

For engineering at the undergraduate level, the math really isn't that hard. It LOOKS hard for sure and some of the derivations are pretty intense, but most of it is no more difficult than that problem I posted when you break it down to the core components. The real challenge is more in understanding how and when to use the appropriate formulas/variables/assumptions and all that jazz, which can be far trickier than you might imagine.