I’ve definitely experienced that too sometimes a random video or post just clicks way better than a classroom explanation. But to be fair, many teachers have so much on their plate beyond just teaching. In Mexico, tools like MI Portal Fone are actually helping ease that load by giving teachers quick access to their pay stubs, CURP, RFC, and tax info without having to go through tons of paperwork or office visits. When systems like that handle the boring admin stuff, teachers can focus more on connecting with students and maybe even explain math like those viral internet folks.
This post confuses me. Why would code be simpler than the math notation? Both involve symbolic abstraction of basically the same complexity
Its got to be a relatively small group who knows enough to understand loops and is also afraid of math symbols.
Hi, I’m the problem. It’s me.
Maybe not so small?
I never encountered these math symbols but for loops are like step 3 in any programming language after variables and conditionals
lol, like 2.5% of the USA are programmers and even if we say twice that number have experimented and taken programming classes, that’s like 1 in 20 people who would even have ever encountered a for loop. This nsf report says ~70% of highschoolers have taken Algebra 2 or a more advanced math course, which is when sum notation is usually introduced. I think 70% is a little greater than 5%!
The hard part of math isn’t understanding esoteric symbols it’s the theory behind it and it’s application. Number theory will mindbreak almost all people.
i still don’t understand but thanks
Oh cool, I know who this person is, she did a couple of amazing videos on Bezier curves and splines
You can reduce this readable code into one line of confusing python list comprehension that runs 100x slower!
Maybe I’m crazy but they did teach me this in school. “This means so this operation until conditions are met”.
Just notational difference other than presence of mutation… How is it harder to understand
3 + 6 + 9 + ... + 3nmeans compared to the for loop? Is repeated addition hard to grasp?People who are arguing that one way of expressing these concepts is easier to learn/understand than the other are missing the whole point. Mathematical notation was not designed to teach students how to do math or explain how to design algorithms. It was invented to communicate precise, abstract ideas concisely between mathematicians who already understand what the symbols mean.
Mathematicians require a notation that has the flexibility to manipulate mathematical objects/symbols in a way that naturally emphasizes their properties and relationships. Often they don’t even care whether the objects they’re studying are even computable or have a numerical representation. They just need them to have certain properties so that they can be manipulated appropriately.
Discrete sums are a rare example of when the mathematical notation overlaps with the description of an algorithm for computing its value (and the overlap is not even complete; infinite sums are easily represented in math notation but are practically uncomputable when implemented naively). Every other advanced mathematical concept puts a premium on ease of symbol manipulation over computability: integrals, derivatives, matrix multiplication, abstract algebra, etc.
TL;DR math notation is complex because its intended audience is people who already understand it, want maximum flexibility of symbol manipulation, and historically didn’t really care about practical computation.
i hate that we all got so frightened about math. it’s genuinely fun to learn how it works when you’re not being forced to in a school setting, which was just a fucking nightmare for no reason. i had this former navy DI lady teacher in gifted kid algebra [so already a year ahead] yell at me for asking questions; she wasn’t going to ‘hold my hand’ thru the homework, which was quite literally her fucking job
