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enitharmonA thick package plopped on my mat this morning - an undergraduate prospectus from Lancaster University. I've been thinking about doing another degree, in maths this time.
The thing is, it's always rankled with me that I struggled with maths when I was young. Yes, I know I got a B at maths A-Level, and I completed my first degree in physics, albeit a pretty undistinguished one, which requires some grasp of maths however much lab work can be counted and essay questions answered in exam papers. But I'm still haunted by the ghost of my 4% in my mock A-level Applied Maths paper, the pages and pages of carefully worked-through prooofs that never got any nearer tyhe expected result (and never came out the same twice running), the sense of dizziness I felt in Uni maths lectures at bizarre concepts like the Gamma Function, the cold sweat induced by the mere sigh of the Schrödinger Wave Equation. What made it worse is that all my peers seemed to take it in their stride.
Earlier this year I bought a textbook of A-Level Pure Maths and I've been working through it steadily in odd moments. To my amazement I find that trigonometric proofs fall out neatly under my fingers, I can manipulate matrices (actually I always liked matrices, I can integrate by parts, at least at a relatively uncomplicated level. It all seems so easy now, almost frustratingly trivial, and I want to go on. Hence the interest in university courses. I want to see if I can take this further, even understand the fearsome Gamma function! And before I die I want to understand wave mechanics.
Mathematicians are supposed to burn out young - why is it, then, that what was so mind-blowingly difficult at 18 makes so much more sense at 52, even having not touched maths with the proverbial bargepole in the intervening years.
Am I too old to do thi, do you think?
The thing is, it's always rankled with me that I struggled with maths when I was young. Yes, I know I got a B at maths A-Level, and I completed my first degree in physics, albeit a pretty undistinguished one, which requires some grasp of maths however much lab work can be counted and essay questions answered in exam papers. But I'm still haunted by the ghost of my 4% in my mock A-level Applied Maths paper, the pages and pages of carefully worked-through prooofs that never got any nearer tyhe expected result (and never came out the same twice running), the sense of dizziness I felt in Uni maths lectures at bizarre concepts like the Gamma Function, the cold sweat induced by the mere sigh of the Schrödinger Wave Equation. What made it worse is that all my peers seemed to take it in their stride.
Earlier this year I bought a textbook of A-Level Pure Maths and I've been working through it steadily in odd moments. To my amazement I find that trigonometric proofs fall out neatly under my fingers, I can manipulate matrices (actually I always liked matrices, I can integrate by parts, at least at a relatively uncomplicated level. It all seems so easy now, almost frustratingly trivial, and I want to go on. Hence the interest in university courses. I want to see if I can take this further, even understand the fearsome Gamma function! And before I die I want to understand wave mechanics.
Mathematicians are supposed to burn out young - why is it, then, that what was so mind-blowingly difficult at 18 makes so much more sense at 52, even having not touched maths with the proverbial bargepole in the intervening years.
Am I too old to do thi, do you think?
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no subject
Date: 2006-12-05 04:28 pm (UTC)sense of dizziness
Date: 2006-12-05 04:33 pm (UTC)Go for it!
Date: 2006-12-05 09:45 pm (UTC)Am I too old
Date: 2006-12-05 11:47 pm (UTC)I intend to take up new subjects next year. I'm starting with conversational languages, I think, but that may change before the new year.