re: #80 LudwigVanQuixote

But that’s my point. You should have had a good teacher.

I’ve had over 6,000 students in classes by now. I started tutoring calculus when I was twelve. I can honestly say that in all of that time I have only met three students whom I felt would just never get it.

People have different learning styles and people respond better or worse to different types of examples, but I have never met a person who writes half as well as you who couldn’t do it in time.

Well (true story) I knew someone in the math department at Stanford and once found myself at a party with people i didn’t know and fell into a conversation with some random guy and because everyone was a geek we started talking about mathematics, and strangely he got really excited and interested in the conversation and talked and talked and listened and listened for over an hour. Me, I was just blabbing it seemed without getting anything specific like actual equations and stuff — just some musing about overall trends and theories and so forth, most of which I had just absorbed osmotically over the years (never having taking a single math class after 11th grade). Eventually my friend came over and popped the bubble when he poo-pooed my math knowledge, saying to the other guy, “Oh, you don’t want to talk to [zombie] because [zombie]’s not a mathematician.” He then explained to me that the guy I was talking to was an absolutely world famous mathematician and the only topic he was even capable of conversing on was abstruse math.

I wandered away, but a few days later, my friend called me to say that Mr. Famous Guy had assumed I was on his level and was absolutely floored to discover that I was also not a world famous mathematician; and that he had formally invited me to apply for the Stanford math graduate program, because he felt I had something to contribute. All based on this one conversation.

Needless to say, I turned him down, since I secretly hate math. But others (not just you and this guy) have told me throughout my life that I was a “natural” for math and that it was a tragedy that I learned to hate it due to bad teachers.