Do I need to try to love math?

Mathematics allows you to achieve success: launch rockets, train AI, and so on. Graduates of mathematical specialties are considered the highest quality personnel. Young workers, students and schoolchildren, who do not ideally solve training tasks, often complex about this. Such people usually worry that if they could love and understand mathematics, their life would change for the better, but alas, “not given” is for them.

I explain why you do not need to worry and rape yourself.

It is said that mathematics is the queen and the crown of all sciences, that without mathematical thinking it is impossible to survive and succeed, and that everyone should be able to do it. Mathematical tasks are set upon admission to universities and recruitment. Mathematics is actively used by technologies that shape our life - in engineering, IT, finance ... A mathematician is a superhero of our time who takes on any tasks, solves all problems, and saves the world when no one else can.

This story begins with elementary school: all children should know mathematics for a good grade, and if this is not the case, then they are problematic or perhaps just stupid. The phrases “good at math” and “very smart” become almost interchangeable. By the strength of mathematical thinking they judge how capable and promising you are in general. In this case, perhaps in school you were afraid of math, but you decided / wrote off your homework, gritting your teeth, and did not understand how you could love this terrible incomprehensible uninteresting subject.

When the school has long been a thing of the past, you graduated from high school and even got a normal job, math fever let go a little. But not until the end. You read articles on vc.ru and channels in the Telegram about someone's start-ups based on the latest technologies. And you're in the background thinking that if you had mathematical skills and education, your life could be better. You would start to do artificial intelligence / blockchain / big data / algorithmic trading, establish a startup “unicorn” and change the world for the better. But then you remember that you don't put your fractions badly in your mind. You realize that you are too stupid to do this, or you studied in the humanitarian class, or you retook mathan in the first year, or you just don’t love math enough ... And you accept these restrictions, and realizing you are second-class people, you return to your routine with a sigh. Maybe you give yourself a promise to learn mathematics next year (when life gets better), and still come back to this dull, annoying your current job.

Although mathematics is used in a wide variety of professions and industries, it is rarely used explicitly. Designers do not solve diffura - they calculate the trajectory of the rocket (and, perhaps, use software for this, which solves diffura). Economists do not equate derivatives to zero in the search for the optimal sales volume - they look at the numbers in Excel, and choose the option with the highest projected profit (or NPV). Statistics do not calculate $$$(X ^ TX) ^ {- 1} X ^ Ty$on a Gaussian paper — they write something like np.linalg.lstsq(X, y) , and spend their time thinking about whether they included all the necessary factors in X We may not notice this, but intellectual work is almost completely automated. Any complex equation the computer will decide for you if you run the right program. For any task, you can pick up such a hammer, that it will seem to you just a nail.

If you want to engage in analytical activities, the ability to work with the tools for you is much more important than the ability to count. "Work with tools" means:

• adequately set the task;
• find suitable tools for its solution and choose the best one;
• deal with the specifics of the work of this tool and correctly apply it to the task;
• check the result for adequacy, and if necessary, redo any of the previous steps - for example, change the tool.

All these steps seem obvious and based purely on common sense. But this common sense is sharpened only by practice, and the more different tasks you set, provide with tools, decide and check, the better you will get it.

Unfortunately, the setting of tasks, and the search for tools among the unknown , and the rapid development of new tools (at least asking questions and reading documentation), and working on errors in near-mathematical courses are often not taught. Instead, they give a ready-made task (often sucked from the finger), and they call a ready-made tool (for example, a theorem that is being passed now), to which there is already an instruction manual for use, and which is guaranteed to give an "on credit" solution. Not surprisingly, in the end, mathematics seems to you a collection of abstractions, invented for the sole purpose of bringing out your brain.

What tools are there at all? In addition to narrowly focused (software for calculating the trajectory, Excel, SciPy ecosystem in Python, "metainstruments" are no less important: search engines, reference books, forums, electronic libraries. For example, any programming question you can think of has already been answered (almost probably) on stackoverflow. The times when it was possible or necessary to “know everything” ended in the last century; now it is much more important to “know where to find everything.” Advanced educational institutions and employers understand this: for example, on entering into the School of Data Analysis we can about bringing any literature, but you could use it.

It may seem that the attitude to mathematics as a tool, and not as a shrine, demeans you. But in fact, in order to be "cool, and as a scientist," you just have to do the right things personally, personally and interestingly, and treat them in good faith. If you want to make money or change the world, get engaged with this, and not with math! In the eyes of people, you will become "smart" and even, maybe, a "mathematician", but you yourself will feel that in mathematics and in general in life you do not understand anything. This is normal and not at all embarrassing. You can reassure yourself that the more knowledge, the greater the limit of ignorance.

Deeply working through the tasks you take on, you will understand better and better what you want, until you turn it into an algorithm. For example, you need to attract more customers through the site (task). Having fiddled with it, you will break the sales funnel and estimate the conversion at each stage approximately, choose bottlenecks, conduct experiments, sort out many options, and eventually find the best way to increase this conversion. This process of concretization of the problem is the real mathematics. And the resulting algorithm (for example, a formula that selects which button to show the client) is not the mathematics itself, but only its product.

When you want to achieve a specific goal, you use all the available tools, including mathematical ones. If you yourself cannot take the integral, then you are looking for an assistant, ask a question on the forum, conduct a numerical experiment, replace the task with a simpler one, buy a more powerful computer - and in the end everything works out for you. A motivated person does not sit or give birth to an “ideal” mathematical solution, but searches for any solution that satisfies his goals. The fear of mathematics arises when you think that the inability to solve a problem will prove to the world that you are stupid. But if mathematics is not an end in itself, there is nothing to fear: you can cheat, you can write off, you can shift the task to others, or you can choose the right solution at random. And no one will blame you for it (except for those who envy you).

Schoolchildren, who study maths, in order to enter a university, or students who work on it, in order to finish this university, may object to me. They can say that their goal is to prove that they are smart. But in this situation, you can continue to ask why. Why end high school? To gain professional competence. Is it possible to get them differently? Yes, there are more direct ways: online education, paid courses, tutoring, internships, mentors, the study of other people's successful solutions from open sources ... There can also be mathematics. But at least you will understand that it is necessary for business, and not for demonstrating your own dignity, and will treat it not as an icon, but as a useful tool. As a result, you will save yourself from the torment of learning, in which you do not see the point, and will sooner reach the final goal (employment).

Another situation is possible: you realize that you love mathematics at its best, but you still understand theory badly, it bores you. Then you can advise:

• easy blogs about mathematics in life, from section n + 1 to public vk - there mathematics is fed to you with a spoon and with jam;
• development of unpretentious games. To create even a minimal game world (like a flappy bird), you will need a fair amount of equations, and as you come up with them and code, your intuition runs the risk of pumping heavily;
• data analysis. Over the past year, big data, AI, ML and this has all become almost the main trend in the business, and, as a result, in the labor market. Many come to this area without knowing mathematics, but know how to program, and understand everything along the way. And it seems that this strategy works well.

Conclusions . I think you have already understood how I answer the question from the title of this text: you don’t need to try to love mathematics forcibly. Because:

1. There is a lot of mathematics around us, and this creates social pressure: your progress in mathematics becomes a measure of your whole personality, which, if you think about it, is absurd.
2. To solve practical problems, deep mathematics is usually not needed — there is enough common sense in choosing tools.
3. When you do interesting and useful things, math often comes to you by yourself. But not as a painful end in itself, but as a useful tool for achieving your real goals.

Feel free to do what you like and do not force yourself to everything else.

Good luck to you!