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Numbers

After this academic term, which I call the worst academic term since I was born (for various reasons), I have come to the conclusion that this is how my teachers give me marks.
I have done well in courses I know I am pretty incompetent in, and done badly in courses I know I am pretty competent in.

As I move up to more advanced math courses, I start to realize the divergence of 'math' and 'numbers'. In the courses I took this term, statistics is the 'mathy' course most concerned with numbers. There is an entire field dedicated to numbers because it is so mysterious - seriously.

“Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.”
― Aaron Levenstein
How do you know when you look at a set of data if there is a pattern or not, and if there is a pattern, if it is significant or not. Even just looking at my marks this term, I cannot compare them to last term, because the two set of data are different in fundamental ways and I cannot conclude if I did better this term or last term.

In the middle of my horrifying term, I came to the realization that no one ever taught me what is 'math' and its relationship with numbers. In sixth grade when I first took physics, biology and chemistry, the first lesson was always an introductory lesson that defines what the subject is. But no one in grade 1 told me what math is. At that point, everyone assumed math is the study of numbers. But is that so true? One glance at my notes for math this term and you will see mostly letters, latin and greek. And it seems in popular culture (movies and the media), whenever the intent is to confuse you or make things look complicated, they show a bunch of equations with letters in them and immediately the math becomes complicated.

If we can understand the relationship between numbers since grade 1, how hard is it to understand the relationship between letters? x+y, xy, x^2y etc.

Now that I've taken the last math course of my undergraduate career, I immediately feel the want to take more math courses, regardless of how many times I've annoyed my friends with complaints regarding the topic. But it is such a powerful tool that allows us to see beyond the obvious and think in the abstract. It is such a precise and flawless language that has allowed our species to go much further than our ancestors.

This year I've read a good number of books on patterns, how we find them, how they are deceiving and how we know for sure a pattern is a real pattern. In the end I have to marvel at how our species was able to come up with this. How, did it ever come to our realization the patterns and how did we ever invent math? And with the invention of computers, modern math research has trended toward applied math and using computers to aid our understanding. Where would that take us? Will it get us closer to understanding the huge complexity of human networks and nature and physical laws?

Sad to say that without advanced training in math, mathematical applications will be extremely difficult to understand and manipulate, and that takes a lot of time, brains and patience that the average person has not. But if the average person does not understand the concepts of statistics and computation, how will he accurately process the information from an enormous database of scientific research - which all employ statistics and math to some extent? This is when the advice from my first year economics teacher becomes so crucial: "assume nothing". I will always treat information with a reasonable amount of skepticism and open-minded, because there is so much I don't know and am uncertain about, even when facing numbers, which are usually considered absolute and precise.



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