It's not a race, but I'm even worse; I just tune out and shut down completely in the face of mathematical formulas on webpages. It's a really visceral reaction.
I've done mathematics in secondary school (coordinate systems, Pythagorean wotsit), but I can still visualize those and put them into practical use. Later on I had statistics and linear algebra - that last one I had to redo and really work on, it was only after I did a minor in game design that I could finally map that math to a practical application.
But I just don't have the background - or interest! - in anything else related to math. And I don't miss it either, else I would force myself to learn about it.
Do you have the same reaction to math in code form? I think I often don’t have the patience to expand things like symbols and ranges in my head in the case of mathematical notation, but math-as-code doesn’t require the same effort.
I have the same with code. I only read or write simple stuff. I used to like mathematics on school, until I just couldn't follow it anymore. It got me hot (physically), with headache akin to migraine. Which gotten worse throughout the years I studied. Now I tend to avoid such state. Its not worth the hassle.
There's a couple of professions/qualities I have a lot of respect for, mathematicians is one of them. I appreciate them for three reasons: their ability to deal with the sheer complexity correctly and calmly, the fact it is unbiased, like science used to be (or rather: a couple of sciences aren't). The third reason is the one outlined above, generally: its a quality I've been unable to possess.
I struggle with math notation but have no trouble with math written as code (C, python functions....). It took me years to be able to see a summation as a for loop.
Amusingly, I'm somewhat the opposite - math written as code takes a lot more parsing to understand. And with regards to for loops, I'll quote something I read a long time ago:
> “When you see a for, while, or do, all you know is that some kind of loop is coming up. To acquire even the faintest idea of what that loop does, you have to examine it. Not so with algorithms. Once you see a call to an algorithm, the name alone sketches the outline of what it does.”[0]
It's why in my last C++ job, I spent a lot of time convincing colleagues to use more of the functions in the algorithms library - so that it's easier to see what they're trying to do, and less likely to insert a bug.
Consider languages that have the ~sum~ function. Would you recommend they instead write a for loop? If not, just replace ~sum~ with the Sigma symbol and you have the mathematical notation.
I've done mathematics in secondary school (coordinate systems, Pythagorean wotsit), but I can still visualize those and put them into practical use. Later on I had statistics and linear algebra - that last one I had to redo and really work on, it was only after I did a minor in game design that I could finally map that math to a practical application.
But I just don't have the background - or interest! - in anything else related to math. And I don't miss it either, else I would force myself to learn about it.