what turned you onto math?

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Mattie

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for me, it was all my grandpa
we played cribbage everyday
6th grade - 9th grade (age 12-14)
 
i'm not really into math. but i got turned onto math by the beauty of it all. also, i like the fact i wasn't good at it.
 
Cribbage turned me onto math as well. Still cant see any two number combination of 15 without thinking in my head 15-2. Very underappreciated game IMO
 
Cribbage is great! One of my favorite games. And yeah, every time I hear "fifteen" I think "two." Maybe that's why I felt underpaid in my first job ! ;-)
 
Physics. You can do amazing things in physics but you have to have strong math. Math by itself doesn't attract me so much, it's more of a tool. When it comes to tools, computers rival the role of math. Wolfram (in his New Kind of Science) argues the world might be better explained in terms of cellular automata than in mathematical terms.
 
Cribbage was a big part for me as well. I played all the time with my gramma growing up and still play whenever I can. Unfortunately granny's gone now. We used to have some great games as she played all over the place in competitive tournaments she loved it so much. She'd never let me win as a kid so I took alot of beatings. But as I got older I was able to hold my own in some very competitve bouts. Damn...I miss that. :-(
 
Cribbage here, too. My dad taught me how to play when I was four. He was an undergrad math major, and a real PITA to beat. Hearts and Pinochle are other family favorites. I excelled at math, as well, though I picked English as my undergrad.
 
I was lucky - in my lifetime I've gotten one 29 hand and two 28 hands. My grandpa played until he was 90 years old and never had a 29 hand....
 
I forget... what hand gives you a 29? I do remember that you have to turn up a jack.
 
Man, I feel like I really missed out on Cribbage. Maybe I should start playing :)

For me, it was the fact that I spent three summers in engineering programs and wanted to become an engineer no matter what. My senior year I met a guy at a recruiting fair and I told him I wasn't so great in Physics (didn't really apply myself) and I was worried, trying to become an engineer and all. He told me, "No big deal. Now if you told me you had trouble with math, now THAT would be aproblem."

The rest is history. After a while, math just became another language I speak -- like I can't remember if I solved PDEs in options class or not, they are just second nature (and fun).
 
I never liked math all that much until I did physics, and especially physics with calculus. Once I saw how knowing math could really help you out in understanding science and other phenomena in the world, I wanted to learn more.

Geometry was great too, and I did it before physics - for a long time I couldn't understand why it was math, and not art or something. Then came theorem-proof logic, which was a great intellectual challenge. Finally, connecting geometry with algebra was interesting, though definitely harder.

So, I guess I really just hated learning arithmetic, but liked a lot of the other stuff.

Strangely, when I did calculus in high school, I could understand the physics applications pretty well, but when they tried to do the economics applications, it all seemed very weird and implausible to me (some of it still does) - I guess it takes more experience with human beings and human behavior before you can start to model things, at least when compared to modeling physical things.
 
bchadwick Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
...
> Strangely, when I did calculus in high school, I
> could understand the physics applications pretty
> well, but when they tried to do the economics
> applications, it all seemed very weird and
> implausible to me (some of it still does) ...

Maybe they apply calculus on things that doesn't really let itself being modelled in that way and you're too good at math to get fooled by it. For some reason answering your entry, Chad, made me think of LTCM and *this* quote from http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/ltcm.htm:

"Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) was a hedge
fund located in Greenwich, Connecticut. The founders
included two Nobel Prize-winning economists, Myron
Scholes and Robert C. Merton. Scholes and Merton,
among other things, developed along with the late
Fischer Black, the Black-Scholes formula for option
pricing. LTCM also included as guiding spirit John
Meriwether, a former vice chairman of Salomon
Brothers and famous bond trader. David Mullins,
a former vice chairman of the Board of Governors
of the Federal Reserve System was also part of the
LTCM team. Also several important arbitrage analysts
from Salomon Brothers joined LTCM. Eric Rosenfeld left
Harvard University to join LTCM. It was a very elite group."



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at Tuesday, August 7, 2007 at 08:17AM by wawa.
 
Deal 6 cards - hold 4 - throw 2 in the crib
hold three 5's and a jack
opponent cuts - turn over the last 5
if the the jack you are holding is the same suit as the 5 from the cut, it's 29 from the "nob". If it's a different suit, its 28.
 
i hated arithmetic too. the turning point for me was algebra. loved it. i think i'm going to have to learn cribbage now...
 
Anyone like Tom Lehrer's "New Math"? It's very very funny. I like the line... "Don't worry, base 8 is just like base 10 really... if you're missing two fingers."

"That's Mathematics" is also cute, but not as clever as "New Math".
 
Baseball and the players baseball cards.

Loved batting average's, RBI's, HR's, etc.
 
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