Current Events > Math concepts you hated to learn

(+) Yeah! (+)

Funny, I thought calc 2 was pretty easy (relative to Calc). Calc 3 and Linear Algebra though, eek.

The worst was still geometry in general, and the proofs therein. Like really boring, tedious logic puzzles with little point.
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DoomSwell posted...

cosine/sine/tangents

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Proofs really didn't bother me at all until Discrete Mathematics. Particularly, Discrete Structures II.
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Discrete mathematics. My professor had like a 75% failure rate. Literally would stand up at the board, write down a proof, tell you to memorize it, then write down another one, etc. Then you get to the exam knowing nothing but fragments of 3 page long proofs, and none of those proofs are on the test.

Ugh, she was such a bad person. A friend needed half a point not to fail, he went into her office, and she wouldn't give it to him. Professor took absolute glee in crushing people, which describes about 90% of my school's engineering professors.
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adding double digit numbers
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- All of calculus
- Cohen forcing
- The classical proof of Cantor-Schroeder-Bernstein, which invokes the axiom of choice

Sativa_Rose posted...

Also I hated learning this really long type of problem in linear algebra, I can't remember what it was exactly but it involved using the Graham Schmidt process as one of the steps. I remember on our final exam the last page had just one question on it, written at the very top, that asked you to do it. Then you had the entire blank page to do it (and you basically needed all that space)

Finding an orthonormal basis? I hated that too, especially when it basically amounted to "memorise this algorithm and do it"
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Sinroth posted...

Finding an orthonormal basis? I hated that too, especially when it basically amounted to "memorise this algorithm and do it"

That was probably it, and that sounds exactly like what my experience with it was. It was just memorizing a series of steps with having no intuitive understanding whatsoever about how I am actually getting from Point A to Point B so to speak.
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Pretty much anything beyond college Algebra and Trigonometry. If I don't have something in my life to immediately apply the math to (I loved physics despite getting a C in that class), I can't understand it.
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