[jscholes]

> Out of curiosity, what does it look like to not-suck at math?

To me, it looks like the rest of your comment, wherein you casually mention constants, theorems, topological homology and other concepts that don't even come to mind for many people who self-identify as being bad at maths (as I do).

[motohagiography]

Thank you, but I am mathematically illiterate. I can't identify greek letters after sigma without looking them up, I ignore equations in papers and other texts unless they are supporting something that offends me, I don't have a working understanding of why certain operations are meaningful or their uses other than knowing there is probably a python library that does anything I could need.

However, things have shapes and relationships, most of which we can't physically see, but we can reason about and compare them, and that's about as deep as I get. e.g. do things at a certain level of abstraction have a similar shape, and what are the words that describe that? Does this tell us more about the thing itself, or the limits of our ability to percieve it, and it's just an artifact of our lens? It's like having an ear for music, where you hear fragments of other pieces in everything, and interpret forms and symmetries and respond to intuitions, expectations, and resolutions - but not being able to play it.

I think we're entering into an era where we can finally have punk math, where some idiots get on stage and the people watching them go, "omg, this is terrible but fun, and I could do this better," and a thousand bands get launched. When I write stuff like that, it's because I don't mind acting as one of those idiots. I figure if most of my favourite bands can't read music, there's interesting math to be done by people who aren't proving anything or making progress, but intentionally or not, like all idiots, they exist as an example to inspire others. :)