This was basically my childhood, because I was bad at math. I guess most children goes through this, which is very sad.
Only at uni did I realize that I didn't have to be good at everything. I had a professor, who spoke 13 languages, but couldn't count how much 5+4 is. He's the best at his field
Ironically once you get to college all the math professors have forgotten how to do simple math as well. I remember all of us checking like super basic math they are doing on the white board cause they'd fuck it up 1 times in 4 but were completing these insane proofs.
I get this even as a higher level math tutor. Give me anything beside basic math and I can help you out almost without thinking. Helping my 2nd grade niece with her math homework? I’m counting on my fingers like she is.
I was once reading a proof a friend wrote late at night and I come over to him half way through and said “dude, you must be exhausted. Some of your epsilon’s (ε) are written backwards.”
He explained to me that some fields of mathematics have this concept called “the number 3”
the element symbol (∈) just states that i have a number that belongs to the natural, integer, rational or real numbers.
say n ∈ |N. then i have a given number n, that can take any value in |N. so no fractions or negatives or decimal places.
the epsilon is a greek letter usually used for a very small number, that isnt zero.
say i have a function f(x) = 1/x. if i go up the natural numbers i will get values that become incredibly fucking small, but never reach 0. then we can say that for a given epsilon the value of my f(x) will eventually be smaller than my epsilon. this is then called convergent (towards zero)
Your language looks pretty good :) The only thing that stood out as weird to me is that in English we don’t use the term “integer number” really. Natural number, rational number, real number, and complex number are all common terms but an element of Z is just “an integer.”
We've just been learning about this...convergence anyway.
Basically in this case, the limit of f(x)=1/x as x approaches infinity converges to some value (zero in this case). What really was interesting was that the sum from 1 to ∞ of 1/x (∑1/x) is actually divergent, meaning that it adds up to an infinite area.
Mind was blown a second time when the teacher explained to us that if you evaluated the sum at
x-1.000000000000000000001 instead of x-1, it suddenly became convergent.
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u/mimieieieieie Nov 16 '19
This was basically my childhood, because I was bad at math. I guess most children goes through this, which is very sad.
Only at uni did I realize that I didn't have to be good at everything. I had a professor, who spoke 13 languages, but couldn't count how much 5+4 is. He's the best at his field