Bachelor of...

[Oliver]

Originally Posted by Lemming

Maths is good... maths is the building block of understanding!

Lemming, I concur.

Furthermore "maths is the building block of" (cricket) statistics.

And I am constantly fascinated by those.

[Mongoose]

Ah, statistics I do enjoy, and that is when Maths becomes enjoyable. It's nice to judge how well players are doing based on individual impressions from seeing them play. But it's also nice to put figures to those performaces. As Lemming says, it gives it a feeling of certainty. Even if this is a false feeling, it's reassuring nevertheless.

[Zainub]

Cricket stats are the only place where I can use the word "fascination" and "numbers" in the same sentence. I am just not a numbers person, numbers and I don't stick - I don't like phone numbers, car number, formulas, money in numbers (especially on price tags)...I much rather love words. That is why I've never liked either Maths or physics or even chemistry for that mater. I know it is done for convenience, but it just doesn't go down well with me when a perfectly wonderful word Helium is reduced to "He" or when mass is to be reduced to simply "m" and "speed of light to "c" and energy to "E" and "is equals to" to parallel straight lines (=) and then equated as E=mc2, I would much rather prefer saying "mass can be converted into energy when its moved at velocity equal to that of light". I just don't like numbers, I like words better. There is nothing words cannot express. At least in the educational sense of things.

[Andy Mellon]

Does it annoy you that Iron is Fe, Gold is Au, Silver is Ag, Tungsten is W, Lead is Pb, Copper is Cu, Tin is Sn?

Ah; the wonders of Chemistry and the Periodic Table.

[Zainub]

It does Andy, no end. The names are derived from the Latin names of elements, and with all respect to Latin, it is a fascinating and wonderful language, I will definately learn it some day God willing, I wouldn't have mind had I been asked to learn their Latin names instead, its just these short cuts that bother me.

Antimony Sb Stibium
Copper Cu Cuprum
Gold Au Aurum
Iron Fe Ferrum
Lead Pb Plumbum
Mercury Hg Hydragyrum
Potassium K Kalium
Silver Ag Argentum
Sodium Na Natrium
Tin Sn Stannum
Tungsten W Wolfram

[Zainub]

Originally Posted by me, my self and I

Am I the only maths hater here? Surely not...

Got too excited, did a quick google search which revealed this

Originally Posted by The Hindu

According to an unofficial survey, about 70 per cent of children in the world dislike this subject. More here

[Paoli]

Originally Posted by Zainub Razvi

Am I the only maths hater here? Surely not...

Hear, Hear Zainub.

Algebra has killed me. I am perfectly fine with the following; statistics, arithmetic, compound and simple interest, data and chance etc. Algebra, along with the fact that I hate it and don't take any interest, has killed me. Next year I will take General Maths Business; the "dumb" maths as it is known; as opposed to Methods 1,2 or General Maths Science. In Year 12 I will take the following; English, Literature, History Revolutions, Economics and Information Processing and Management. No room for maths, at all.

I also believe Beny doesn't take any maths...

[Lemming]

Originally Posted by Zainub Razvi

...I would much rather prefer saying "mass can be converted into energy when its moved at velocity equal to that of light".

Ah, but I wouldn't, because it would be incorrect.

(If you are interested anything with mass cannot travel at the speed of light and E=mc^2 reflects the fact that mass is energy and energy is mass and the equation gives a relationship between the two, an interesting thing is that as an object travels faster it gains more energy, meaning it's mass increases also due to energy-mass equivalence. So if you are sitting next to your friend and have a mass M kg, if you jump on a train which goes pretty fast leaving your friend behind they will look at you travelling on the train and believe your mass to have increased. Admittedly you would have to be going pretty fast. Sorry, I don't mean to be funny or sound patronising!)

I see your point about preferring words rather than symbols, but mathematicians prefer to write things on one line. If I told you to write "Helium" 10,000 times, I'm sure Zainub that you would be wishing to write "He" after 100 or so. Also I'm sure your hand would prefer "E=mc^2" rather than "Energy is equal to mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light in a vacuum"! It's purely a time-saving thing.

[Lemming]

Originally Posted by Paoli69

Algebra has killed me.

Maths - I believe - is maybe the only subject I know of having the knack of "killing" people, sometimes people just reach a point that they cannot go past, it doesn't matter how intelligent they are, most of the time they are very intelligent, and often it doesn't matter how much they work. Sometimes those little symbols just can't be comprehended by people.

[Zainub]

I should probably have added within brackets "under relativistic motion".

And I know symbols are used for convinence, and it would be stupid to say there isn't any logic in it, in fact its full of logic. But I'm naive and no mathematician, so I like to skip the logic and talk emotion. Words are more expressive.

ps: If you told me to write Helium ten thousand times, I would write it once, and then copy and paste using Control plus X and Control plus V keys. (Control is often shortenned to "Ctrl").