Mathematics Is Easy Once You Have Learned It
Posted by
Ravi Kumar at Wednesday, July 1, 2009
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The most difficult mathematics is that which you do not know.
A surprising amount of mathematics is actually easy once you've learned it. Of course, once you learn the easy stuff, then you have to start tacking the deep stuff, and that gets harder.
One teacher I had, was introducing a new concept, and we did an example in class. (and this was a class for good mathematicians -- not your average students) There was a lot of blank stares, and not everybody seemed to follow all the way through.
The very next thing he asked was for us to differentiate the function x² with respect to x. Of course, everybody could do that very easily.
His response? "The reason you can do differentiation, but not the other thing, is that you've differentiated things hundreds of times, but you haven't done this other thing very much yet."