[currymj]

i realize the entire speech is a troll, but it successfully made me very angry. i'm not a physicist, and have no interest in physics, yet I do need mathematics.

so it's always been irritating to me how much introductory or "applied" texts bias themselves towards physics and engineering. like how a lot of multivariate calculus/introductory real analysis texts pretty much limit themselves exclusively to three dimensions and teach notation to match.

it even plagues more advanced books; i'm struggling through Villani's text on optimal transport and nearly every example is from physics even though the theory was developed for economics and has extremely broad applications across many disciplines. half of the "motivating examples" i can't even make sense of what they're talking about.

as much as I struggle with the hyper-abstract bourbaki-style stuff, at least I have a hope of understanding it without needing to dip into an irrelevant discipline where i have no background or historical context.

[mbag]

As a former physicist it also made me angry that they used geometry, when teaching us about multi-dimensional algebra. Professor would tell us that vectors are orthogonal to each other, but not telling us what it actually means is, that changing one of them doesn't affect other. I mean, yes, in hindsight, this information was there, however, when you are just starting to learn something, you have a problem filtering, what is really important and what not.

And for example, a real revelation with regard to infinity came, when I read (or heard somewhere, it was long time ago) that infinity can sometimes be few millimeters or even micrometers. Up until then I always imagined some really large number, but at that point I realized, you need to put problem before you need to put problem before you into perspective.