Today I began another of my periodic half-baked attempts to learn more maths, by borrowing from the library (and starting to read - an important second step) an introductory undergraduate-level textbook.
Every page is full of lines of mathematical symbols, and every intermediate line of mathematical symbols is a necessary step between the preceding line and the following line. So far I’ve got through the first page-and-a-half (on polynomials).
What’s hardest for me about this is the pace: I normally read extremely quickly, gobbling up books on buses, in my lunch breaks at work, in any spare moment I get while sitting at home with the children. I don’t have to sit by myself in a quiet place and pore carefully over texts with brow furrowed and finger moving from left to right across the page. Except that with mathematics texts, that’s what I do have to do. It’s kind of discouraging, but I’m too conceited to do the sensible thing and just give up.
Why do I want to do this? Because there are things that already interest me that you need to be mathematically literate to get anywhere with: mathematical literacy is the price of admission. I don’t fancy myself as a mathematician (I know there’s a sense in which everyone’s a mathematician; it’s a bit like the sense in which everyone who uses language is a poet. “Yes, Jean; but some of us are actually whores”), but I do want to be able to progress further in computer science than I’m able to at present.
This has only a tangential relationship with wanting to be a better programmer: it just isn’t the case that everyone who’s a better programmer than me is also more mathematically literate, or more extensively versed in computer science. There are possible future versions of myself that are better at programming but not significantly better at maths. (On the other hand, I doubt whether there are any possible future versions of myself that are better at maths but no better at programming).
Anyway, I have math envy, and I’m trying - once again - to do something about it. At the very least I want to familiarize myself with the notation, so that the next time I feel I have a real need to understand some piece of the puzzle I don’t get completely put off by the language in which it is expressed.