But How Is This Related To Adhd? I'd Say My Ability To Have Fun Is Diminished Because Of The Dopamine

→ 25 VIII 2021

ok so it's been very busy for me for the past few days. we made the yt video with bf and i finally moved out from my parents

concentration: 4 (recently)

i did some topo but not in a very by-the-book way, more like just reading some interesting stuff in various places. homotopy is super fascinating and visual, i love it. other than that i read about other basic concepts such as compact spaces, connected spaces and axioms of countability. i used to read about the aforementioned axioms a while ago and think "why would you even define something like this why does it matter" but after reading topology by jänich i have the intuition that the first axiom is strongly related to the convergence of sequences, hence knowing that the space is first-countable might be useful for evaluating things like the continuity of mappings and compactness

now, i also have a book called elementary concepts of topology by alexandroff and i can't stop reading it, i'm on the page 20 out of 60 since yesterday. and i think i might finish it today but i'll see. i also want to study 1-dimensional manifolds today or tomorrow

yes, this, but also among other stem courses in a typical school, math is taken the most seriously. idk about other countries, but in poland in highschool people study chemistry, biology, physics and geography only if they decide to take the advanced final exams in these subjects. with math, everyone has take the standard level exam, so it can't be ignored like other subjects

up to highschool everyone has to complete their share of stem courses, but with the subjects other than math, the teachers often allow students to pass by memorizing the theory or by making some extra projects to earn points. with math you can't do that. when someone struggles with physics, the teacher sometimes says "alright, next year you won't have to study physics, so just learn those formulas and definitions and write them down on a test and I will let you pass". in math this is not an option, the student will have to take n more years of math courses

also, math mainly requires learning new skills, not just new information. many people never memorize the "dry theory" in highschool, because you have access to a reference table of formulas during exams and your job is only to know where to use those formulas – no need to memorize anything. but this does not come naturally to everyone and I think a huge part of the problem is teaching people how to work on their problem solving skills. I tutored a few students who believed they were bad at math and their mindset was "I can solve this type of problem because I know how to substitute into this formula, but when the problem is slightly different I panic, because the teacher never showed us how to solve it", which can be fixed by practicing a wider variety of problems and practicing the awareness of one's thinking process

people do not understand that problem solving is a skill on its own and I blame schools for that, because what we are offered is the image of math being about re-using the same kind of thinking processes but with different numbers. heck, when I was in elementary school I thought this is what math is about and I hated it because it's so boring and repetitive. I can imagine, when someone believes that this is what math is supposed to be and then they see the "more real math", which is about creativity, they panic (and rightfully so, they've been lied to)

my unpopular opinion is that not everyone can be good at this, just like I will never be good at understanding literature – my brain just sucks at processing this kind of stuff and I have aphantasia which doesn't help at all. but what makes it even worse for those people is the belief that it should be about repeating the same patterns over and over, so when they see that it's something completely different, it must be very frustrating – the reality is inconsistent with their beliefs

I am sure it doesn't cover the entirety of the "oof I always hated math" phenomenon, but it certainly does explain some of it, especially in the context of the education system in my country

As I said in a previous post, I have deep sympathy for the frustration of people who are good at math when they see math so almost universally hated by children and adults

And again and again, they try to explain that math is very much within everyone's reach and can be fun and, at least in western countries, education was to blame, messing up this very doable and fun thing by teaching it wrong

But I still gotta wonder - why math? If it is really just education messing this up, why does it mess up so much with math, specifically? I'm sorry but I still cannot shake the sense that even if it's just bad teaching, math is especially vulnerable to bad teaching.

Or is it maybe just that math is the only truly exact science, so there is no margin of error, so unlike every other field where you can sortof weasel around and get away with teaching and retaining half-truths and oversimplifications and purely personal opinions, math is unforgiving with the vague and the incorrect?

also a funny thing is happening

my title here on tumblr is "you can't comb a hairy ball" – hairy ball theorem, which says that whenever an n-dimensional sphere admits a continuous field of unit tangent vectors, n must be odd. I love how geometric this is, math is full of memes

anyway when I found out about it I was joking that my thesis will be on it. and now it's actually very likely that my first thesis will be about hairy manifolds, I can't wait till I can start writing

15 V 2022

I have a topology test this friday, not gonna lie I'm kinda stressed. this is my favourite subject and I am dedicating a great deal of time to learn it so if I get a low grade it undermines the efficiency of my work. everyone thinks I'm an "expert", but internally I feel like I lied to them. it's ridiculous, because I can solve all the theoretical problems fairly well but the moment I have to calculate something for a specific example of a space I am clueless. and it's about applying theory to problems, right? so what is it worth

other than that tomorrow is a participation round in the integral competition at my university. I am participating. I don't have any high hopes for this, because it's been a while since I practiced integration and I am not motivated to do so because it's not an important skill – wolfram exists. either way could be fun, that's why I decided to go there

I am dreading the fact that I'll have to sit down and learn all the material from the probability theory until the exams. I've been ignoring it completely so far, because it's boring and complicated. the last homework broke me, it's high time to get my shit together

Iconic Things My Coding Professors Have Said (and it’s only day one)

“that sounds very hacky, but smart”

“i’m not sure where i’m going with this… its quite similiar to my life”

*Entire class and prof spends fifteen minutes trying to solve a problem before eventually giving up* “great work guys, that was some good debugging”

“is this a super big issue?” *longggg dramatic sigh* “… yes”.

Professor 1: “it’s still not working? um… okay, maybe you should… turn off your wifi and turn it back on again?“   Professor 2: "40 years of experience in networking and computing at its finest”

“whenever i’m doing my taxes, i never use the calculator app on my phone, i always just open up a notebook and use python and i think thats very brave of me”

“your life quality with improve when you use python 3 instead of python 2. your skin will improve and you’ll even sleep better”

“so this compiler doesn’t recognise cases, so if you’re really perverse, you could do Apple, aPple, apPle, appLe, applE, but if you do that then i’m going to kick you out”

“so, let’s give an example: "True = False”. Asides from causing the end of the world, much like dividing by 0, this will also cause an error”

“if you want to see my cat, i’ll show her. if you DON’T want to see my cat, too bad, cause I’m going to show you her anyway”

“today we will use three keywords: `if`, `else`, and their weird cousin `elif`.”

“if you want to type something else, like… uh, goodbye world? maybe? is that too dark? i think its too dark, so lets save that for later on in the year… by the way, have you been told about your exams yet?”

Professor : “is everything clear so far? shall i go faster?”   Literally EVERYONE: “no! slower!“   Professor: "Slower?! you can go slow when you’re dead, you won’t need python then!”

“you can’t use functions as your variable names. for example, you can’t call this number "if”. i mean i don’t know why you’d use that as your variable name to begin with, but i’m not here to question your life, i’m here to teach you python”

“it’s probably not the most efficient but its just what came out of me so we’re running with it”

Part 1 | Part 2

My favorite example of girl math is when David Hilbert and Albert Einstein couldn't solve how energy conservation worked in general relativity, so Hilbert asked Emmy Noether about it and she solved it for them.

hairy ball theorem, stokes theorem, poincaré duality, nullstellensatz, idk too much to choose one

What is your favourite mathematical theorem? I'm personally torn between the compactness theorem for first-order logic, and the fundamental theorem of Galois theory.

13-16 VIII 2021

much work recently gotta code

gonna monitor only my focus now, define the scale such that 1 means "can't concentrate at all" and 5 means "hyperfocus". today was

focus: 2

i am not doing as much math as i'd like to as i have to focus on the python project i'm doing with bf. anyway, we can say that i did cartesian products of topo spaces, i do have some basic understanding of the concepts now. i started compact spaces. i also need to read some stuff on connectedness and put extra time into analyzing examples of what i've been learning about. so that's the next thing on my schedule, after i'm done with compact and connected spaces

but hey i have 1.5 month of the holidays left and i learned most of the theory planned for me on analysis and half of what i'm supposed to learn on topo. doing good

other than that i decided to write down the structure of how i study:

i find it to be a good way for studying math, it goes brrr like this:

general idea → details, connections and applications

i gained some followers already, i hope you guys enjoy this and possibly find it helpful. moreover, i'm very interested in your custom study algorithms if you have any

"based and purple pilled" with deleted vowels. the first adhd medication I tried was life changing, I could finally study and function (half-)properly, and the pills are purple, hence my version of "based and red pilled", which I probably don't have to explain

Guys please reply to this with what your url means or references I’m really curious

ah yes my boy tom cardy. everyone must listen to him, he's the best

I need everyone to see this ABSOLUTE MASTERPIECE

" 'They' isn't singular!" Oh yeah? Show me its multiplicative inverse matrix then.