I was curious whether one can return to same basic math (calculus and linear algebra in this case) after several years of inactivity in those areas. I was positively surprised that while I forgot many things I was still able to refresh my knowledge quickly. And not only that, I was able to understand some things better than before. So fortunately the years of inactivity had probably no big damaging effect on my mathematical abilities.
I could observe another interesting effect. We computer professionals use to do things quickly without caring too much about bugs – the bugs can be fixed later. Mathematics doesn’t tolerate this approach, computations are often not modular and fixing errors is more expensive. And you don’t have always chance to test the obtained results for corectness which makes errors more dangerous. I was shocked to see how wrong my first computations were. Fortunately I could restore the “mathematical mode of operation” too and got the ability to perform correct computations again.
Last but not least, mathematics is still fun for me. Very well.
I think we miss mathematics in our lives a lot. We allow ignorance to take over our thinking, with corresponding effects on our work. Let’s return to math, we can always learn from it. Demand it – math is power!
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