People say "I'm not a math person". I never really understood that I always thought they just didn't do enough math problems. Now that I struggle to understand math as well I understand why people think they are not a math person. It is because they just don't get "it". Math upto grade 12 was fairly intuitive, nothing I couldn't wrap my head around, maybe just permutations that I didn't understand that well. In Calculus II, you had to take a trace of a 3d shape. If you look at the image below, its a sphere and you have a plane z =1. If you cut the sphere with the flat sheet, you'll get a circle like picture two.
Anyway, I did not understand this. I did all the problems, by memorizing the next step and knowing all the different cases, but I never got "it" until now ( I hope).
I asked my friend in psychology what she thinks about the multiplication. The exact question was "How do you visualize multiplication". She said 5 x 2 = 10, she thinks of two cookies with 5 chocolate chips. If you add all the chocolate chips you'll get 10. On the other hand, when I think of 5 x 2 = 10, I think of a rectangle with 5 units height and 2 units base. The total area being 10 units^2. Both ways of thinking about multiplication are right, there is no wrong answer as long as you are getting the right result. However, one ( the way I think about it) makes calculus a much more natural progression. Since in calculus it is very useful to think of multiplication as area, and we can map many problems to finding the area under the curve (integral). That's where the cookies analogy fails, but there could be a branch of mathematics where the cookies analogy is more intuitive. To summarize, the math person may just be thinking about math abstractly in a fashion where the next step is it is more intuitive. The next step is the most crucial part in math, because everything builds on each other. We learned multiplication in grade 3, and it has a ripple effect on how you perceive math now. I'm sure there are abstractions that are failing me right now, but I won't really know where my abstractions are different from others. It may even be a good thing.
I met Daryl yesterday, probably the only stranger I've met that wanted to talk to me as much as I wanted to talk to them. He asked me "Give me a brief rundown of your life". He was cool we talked about life, he asked if I know any eastern philosophy, I told him I wanted to read the Dokkodo and the Art of War. He told me to read this book called beginner's mind zen mind. I wish I got his contact info, but hopefully I'll see him again.