
A story of a designer learning math - grey-area
https://blog.framer.com/a-story-of-a-designer-conquering-mathematics-d0fd4585f0ba#.jb7sl9qku
======
madlynormal
I'm a self-taught Software Engineer who struggled with basic Math. It's my
goal now to go back and learn Mathematics on a deeper level. I'm reading the
Book "A Mind for Numbers" by Barbara Oakley. In one of the chapters she goes
into detail about how using your minds visual senses can help with grasping
abstract mathematical concepts on a deeper level. Your experimentation with
Math and Design, to me, is a perfect example of what Barbara was talking
about.

~~~
jordigh
> a self-taught Software Engineer

Not to diminish your accomplishments, and I applaud your efforts to educate
yourself. I was just thinking how odd it would sound if someone were to say
that they were a self taught civil engineer or a self taught chemical
engineer. This is just because I'm used to the word "engineer" being
regulated, as it is in the countries I have lived in.

~~~
jacobolus
There have been and are plenty of “self-taught” civil engineers. We can start
with, say, Archimedes, Vitruvius, Simon Stevin, Leonardo da Vinci, or Bucky
Fuller.

There are (for good reasons) particular modern jobs which require licensure,
but plenty of production engineering work of all types, even today, is done by
folks who don’t have a history of school study or certifications in the field.

It’s not like college lecture halls are the uniquely best learning environment
in the world.

~~~
jimminy
Some countries, such as Canada, regulate the usage of the term as jordigh
mentioned. If you have not passed the rigors of educational requirements and
licensure you cannot call yourself that. It is similar to claiming to be an MD
in the US.

~~~
madlynormal
A quick search turned up multiple job postings with Engineering titles
(Software, Test, QA) in Canada. These companies list requirements being a
CS/Engineering degree or equivalent experience. Apparently, these companies
value production over title semantics.

I'm interested in knowing what you consider the meaning of Engineer to be.

~~~
jimminy
I'm not Canadian, upon looking up the actual rules it is provincial laws. The
most well know restriction is in Ontaria and is restricted to the title of
"professional engineer". They still frown on it and actually fought Microsoft
over their certification titles.

Top result when searching was Quora [1].

My personal view, is it doesn't matter much. I often choose to refer to myself
as a Developer, just because of the confusing discussions Canadian Engineers
have presented in the past.

Ifind software titles to be unnecessarily inflated, both in seniority and
position. The title of Developer or Programmer would be fine in many cases,
unless your looking for Architectural roles (can also have similar titular
restricitions). Also, many roles could easily drop Senior, often it is just
used for mid-level roles requiring some degree of experience over junior
roles.

The whole of title structure in the industry is very ego-driven rather than
role driven. I often break my titles down to specify my focus area, e.g. Lead
API Developer, which includes everything from speccing to infrastructure and
tooling (which some generally use as claims of engineering).

[1] : [https://www.quora.com/Only-Professional-Engineers-can-be-
cal...](https://www.quora.com/Only-Professional-Engineers-can-be-called-
Engineer-in-Canada-What-other-title-can-we-use-for-them)

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koenbok
Maker of Framer ([http://framer.com](http://framer.com)) here. Cool to see
this popping up on HN. We are a code based interactive design tool, and see
many designers use/learn code to experiment with math, real data and physics.

~~~
mahesh_rm
Kudos to Koen and to the whole Framer Team. They are a passionate and
outstandingly competent and available crew, which is constantly giving back to
the design/coding/makers community. ps> I use your open source tool cactus on
a daily basis:
[https://github.com/eudicots/Cactus](https://github.com/eudicots/Cactus)!

~~~
koenbok
Thanks! You're welcome!

PS. I recently rewrote Cactus as a Gulp script. It's called Moonbase:
[https://github.com/motif/moonbase](https://github.com/motif/moonbase)

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jfe
I used to think that being a software engineer meant you were intelligent, and
worked hard to earn the title, but after working in the industry for 6 years,
I decided that, large-scale software project management problems aside,
industrial computing just isn't that hard relative to math and the sciences.

Once you know a dozen languages and understand the running themes of
computing, it's all sort of old-hat. Ironically, as the field has been flooded
with young, inexperienced devs to satisfy market demand, the titles of
"software developer" or "nerd" have become social badges to indicate one's
intelligence and cutting-edge-ness. We use 50-year-old operating systems and
call ourselves innovators.

Maybe, like Groucho Marx, I just don't want to belong to any club that would
accept me as a member, but I think that if you're looking to level-up
intellectually, studying math and science, but especially math, is the way to
do it. I was never good at math, but I've spent the past year teaching myself
calculus and the struggle has been well worth the expansion in my world-view.

~~~
xapata
I'm mildly surprised you didn't know calculus before becoming a software
engineer. I suddenly realized that I falsely assumed calculus would be common
knowledge to all programmers and now I'm wondering what else would not be that
I've been assuming.

~~~
tenaciousDaniel
I taught myself programming after graduating from art school. I never took
calculus or trigonometry even in high school, so my math skills are as basic
as you can get as an adult.

Still, I'm currently trying to teach myself math because it seems like it will
help me improve as a developer. It's very hard, though, to learn this stuff
when you're 32.

~~~
echelon
Why is it any harder at 32 than at 22?

~~~
faitswulff
It could be age related cognitive decline, real or imagined, but it could also
be prioritizing any of the following over learning largely irrelevant
mathematics: children and family, exercise, bills/finances/health care, social
obligations, politics.

Plus, it's much more likely for a 22 year old to be able to go to college /
grad school and be required to learn math.

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ivan_ah
Geometry and art are definitely related, and you need to know the equations to
generate the drawings. It's amazing how much possibilities are open once you
know some basic high school math (see my book
[https://gum.co/noBSmath](https://gum.co/noBSmath)).

This article is also a nice example of just-in-time learning: learning new
material is so much more fun when you have a concrete goal in mind, rather
than relying on a "you'll use this later"-promise.

~~~
TY
Love your book, it was a very concise, to the point refresher of mathematics
for me.

Also, the progression of topics felt very comfortable to me, almost like my
school experience back in the Soviet days (and I mean it in a very positive
way).

What I'd love and would gladly pay for is an additional exercise book with
answers to accompany your book, just like in the spirit of the old textbooks.

~~~
ivan_ah
I hear you. What would you call that, решебник/сборник? I'm planning to make
an exercise generator framework with print(.tex) and web(.html) backends. The
early khan-academy exercise framework was pretty awesome since it could
generate random problem instances.

BTW, which edition of the book do you have? I've been adding exercises and
problem sets progressively over the years. Currently there are 55 exercises
(mostly Chapter 1) and 284 problems:

    
    
        ~/P/M/M/problems> grep "\\\begin{exercise}" *tex | wc
              55     112    2768
        ~/P/M/M/problems> grep "\\\begin{problem}" *tex | wc
             284     579   12065
    

In the meantime, you can email me and I can send you the latest version of the
book or a standalone document with just the exercises and problem sets.

~~~
TY
I'd just call it Exercise Book (Сборник упражнений с ответами) - nothing fancy
and to the point.

I have a dead tree version of the book, purchased from Canadian Amazon. Not
sure which printing (if you had multiple), it's at home now and I'm in the
office.

Thank you for the offer - will email you in a moment.

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roesel
It took me a while to get over "math" meaning "understanding geometry", but I
appreciate the main theme of the article anyway. Some of my art friends could
use a little bit of "math" as well.

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fibo
Hi all', I am graduated in mathematics. I studied a lot and also teached
sometimes, but I am working as a programmer, I am not a teached, I teached to
gain some money while I was studying.

I love math and I Can explain It to everyoneishappy, I have this superpotere I
Can male people under stand also deeply advanced mathematics.

I noticed that a lot of people "hates" math but they like It, they have a bad
Memory about Who teached them when they were young, so they say "i hate math"
but they actually hate their first teacher.

As soon as somebody explain them math with Joy and without humiliation if they
don't know, they really like It.

The point is that even the highest mathematician does not know, cause in math
there Will Always bè misteriose.

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cj_marco
Pls checkout - [https://betterexplained.com/](https://betterexplained.com/)

~~~
big_paps
this is a fantastic resource !

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mccoyspace
I'm an artist and professor of digital art so I know right where this writer
is coming from. You can't underestimate the importance of Processing in
forging this pathway for artists and designers to connect with computer
science and mathematics. By sandboxing full featured languages into
development environments geared for immediate visual output you open up the
possibilities of computation to a whole new class of people.

When teaching I can appeal to their experiences in High School math, but now
ideas that were very abstract and remote have an immediate, visual presence.
It really works. Trig is usually the first big break through (because who
wants the animations to just move in a straight line?) but most eventually get
to simple linear algebra as they merge and combine elements from multiple
arrays of pixel data. It's empowering.

In my teaching I've moved from Processing (which is Java-based) to p5js and
other tools (like framer) based on html5 and open web standards. I've recently
introduced aframe. We'll see what new math skills emerge in art students from
working with real-time 3d engines.

(edit=fixed typos)

~~~
closed
That's really cool. Your comment reminded me a bit of how kids can go from
disinterest to total fixation if something involves minecraft. (and I mean
that in the best way possible).

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jimmaswell
Reminds me of making my TI-83 draw a bunch of patterns in high school with TI-
BASIC. It had functions to lines, circles, and some others. Some pretty
interesting shapes emerged from just trying out various combinations of LINE
TAN(X),SIN(X),COS(X),ABS(X) and such, with X being a variable that I'd make
the main loop increment between 0 and 359, or sometimes multiple variables, or
it being incremented differently than linearly. I wish I'd have cataloged
them.

~~~
cableshaft
I played around with my graphing calculator in the same way, just trying out
different equations to see what they looked like, and even made some simple
games out of them. I kind of miss that, because I had a much better idea of
what different functions looked like on a graph than I do now, when I could
actually use them for animations in games (I mostly just use sines and cosines
for oscillating animations and log functions for easing).

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tantalor
Why do the links on this page redirect through Facebook?

~~~
RickS
Presumably they were "right click > copy link"'d by the author, who didn't
realize facebook was inserting themselves before the destination URL.

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agumonkey
When does one consider math learned ?

~~~
beachbum8029
When you can write a proof for every mathematical statement that is true.

~~~
agumonkey
What about finding creative approaches to unproven statements ?

~~~
lotu
beachbum8029 is being silly because the Godel incompleteness theorem stats
that is you cannot prove all true statements.

~~~
ulucs
or you can prove some false statements

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agjacobson
Reminds me of doodles I made when I was around 9. I had a ruler, a compass,
and a pen; no computer.

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cj_marco
Any thoughts about M.C. Escher?

