
Ask HN: Anybody do maths as a hobby? - examcoffee
How is your experience? Interests? Success to the point of professional maths community recognition?
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ccvannorman
I do maths as a hobby but I'm very visual/spatial thinker and not good at
proofs/jargon. I've also made several math video games (supermathworld.com is
the latest).

What I've found is that high interest and aptitude is not enough for community
recognition. It seems like a pretty competitive thing, you have to do
something significant like prove an unproven theorem to really get
"recognition".

But why do you want recognition? Or is your goal just to have more fun?

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fratlas
Any advice on a visual/spatial person's method to learn linear algebra?
Specifically matrices and why transformations are important, not just how to
perform them.

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mathgenius
Did you try the 3blue1brown videos ?

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fratlas
Thank you so much, binge watching now!

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nradov
Quite a few HN users participate in Project Euler.
[https://projecteuler.net](https://projecteuler.net)

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Johnny_Brahms
406 and counting!

We have actually used similar problems (variations of the sub-100 problems
that require only high school maths) as questions in our hiring process.

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gtani
(answering a different question) A lot of people are deciding they need to get
a solid grasp of linear algebra, calc up thru some real analysis/measure
theory, convex optimization, probability theory so they can read deep
learning/machine learning paper.

So there's meetups, study groups, subreddits to work thru different topics

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psyc
I study math for fun. It's very mind-expanding. Inevitably, it feeds back into
my work eventually, allowing me to conceive algorithms I would have struggled
with or been unable to imagine.

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it_can_be_done
I use and study math in hobby projects. I started enjoying math when I found
out that I can do cool things with it. It's been long journey because I lacked
motivation when I was a kid.

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usgroup
There's some good stories of amateur becoming professors and more. E.g.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Pitts](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Pitts)

Mind you I'd imagine it to be much easier if you just do that damned masters
you've been planning to and go the PhD route.

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solomatov
Personally I am interested in logic, dependent types, homotopy type theory and
category theory. I study them as a side project when I have time.

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JackMorgan
I barely passed Calc 1 on my third try in university. Somehow I'd missed most
of Algebra 2 and Trig in my unaccredited overseas high school.

Ten years later I decided to work my way through Kahn Academy from Calc 1
through Diff Eq after a colleague said I'd "never be able to understand"
linear algebra. I bombed so many tests I got auto placed back into pre-
algebra. So now I'm working through that a bit at a time, up to Algebra 2 :)

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Artlav
Pure math? Not really.

Math as applied to some numeric solution or another? All the time.

I like building models and simulators, for stuff ranging from a space elevator
to the sound of a supersonic rooster. I like making procedural generation
models, from expanding a set of parameters into a realistic texture to making
a whole universe from a single seed number.

This sort of stuff. It's more or less in the art category than anything
practical.

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alixaxel
I used to stay up nights in my teenage years doing math for fun and actually
came up with two or three theorems by myself. What I found out was that all of
my (previously) unknown unknowns were are actually very well known within the
math community (Wilson's theorem, Fermat's little theorem, trailing zeroes in
a factorial, ...).

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EliRivers
Certainly do. Decided about eight years ago, after fumbling with some
integrals that I know I used to be able to handle, to get my maths skills
back.

Being the sort of person that I am, I signed up for a Masters in Maths with
the Open University. It was far more brutal than I had hoped. I'd call it a
success in as much as five and a half years later I finished it. I'll never do
any maths of interest or note to the professional maths community, but I hope
they at least recognise the qualification :/

Exams are a kid's game, I learned; three hours in an exam hall with a brutal
set of maths questions is physically exhausting as well as mentally. There
were five of those. Fully five-sixths of the MMaths with the OU is (or was,
when I did it) assessed purely on formal exams in big exam halls, which is the
only way it can be, but it sure does pile on the pressure with the whole
year's worth of study riding on those three hours.

It taught me how to pick up a thick, savage maths text book and learn from it,
which is a really useful ability. It also taught me to hate with a vengeance
textbooks and explanations that don't clearly define their terms, their
operations and their ranges of applicability. I read Physics at university the
first time round, which was short on computing lectures as you might expect,
so my introduction to order notation was formal and mathematical; the last
time someone asked me about it in an interview, they got diagrams, graphs,
ranges of applicability, definitions, examples, a short diatribe about how
using the symbol '=' was really unhelpful, the whole lot. Seemed to go well;
when we got to the section on his "things to ask about" sheet marked
"communication skills" he just put a tick in the box and said we could skip
over it, so one unexpected benefit of maths as a hobby has been to force my
own mathematical thinking into rigour, with a knock-on effect in technical
communication.

How it works for me is probably not how it would work for everyone, and I
learned it the hard way; grind. Hour after hour, evening after evening,
weekend after weekend of just sitting at the table with the book, some pencils
and pads of paper. Each time I'd be done for the day, I'd pick up and recycle
the drifts of paper that had collected on the floor as I'd discarded each
piece I didn't need anymore. It gets in you, sometimes. I'd sit down at
lunchtime with a sandwich, thinking I'd just look at the next question to get
a feel for it, and get up again six hours later having thrashed it to death,
picked it apart, textbooks I didn't even remember fetching from the shelf open
on the desk, and pages and pages around my feet containing my own handwriting
that I also didn't remember writing. Each time I found something I just
couldn't grasp, couldn't understand, I'd just push on. Sometimes I'd never get
it, sometimes I'd come back to it twenty pages later and it would seem simple
(and sometimes I'd rage at how poorly the author had explained it, which was
probably fifty percent the thrashing of my dying ego).

I have genuinely described as "black magic" taking a converging infinite
series, and by adding zero to it, making it converge faster. So much faster.

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tonyedgecombe
Interesting, I did my degree (in Maths) with the OU and have been pondering
whether to do my masters.

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usgroup
I had considered similarly but basically all of the masters modules are
compulsory and not interesting to me. Fractal geometry anyone ?

