What's the highest level of math you've studied?

@Nimbus I've never used an abacus but I can still remember how to use a slide-rule or log. tables!

(For anyone who might have heard of those but never used them, they were the standard, pre-calculator, tools for multiplication, division and powers arithmetic.)

@ArishMell I remember slide rules, horrid things.

@Nimbus Mmmm!

I once wanted to perform a calculation a bit too awkward for pen-and-paper (I think it involved a root of a decimal value), but I could not find my calculator anywhere.

"Ah!" thinks I, "Slide Rule!" I never thought of them as horrid but did struggle with maths.

Could not find that either - my home defies my efforts to be organised and tidy, let alone try Feng-shui or any other minimalist fad.

Nothing for it... Logarithm tables, revising the method from a worked example in the book.

Nest day I bought a new scientific calculator... the lost one turned up three weeks later, when I was looking for something else!

@SW-User lol

@Mamapolo2016 if only it was possible to do that

@rickfreeman15 If only

@TheOneyouwerewarnedabout 🤣🤣

@TheOneyouwerewarnedabout TOES! I never thought of that!
You have doubled my math-ma-tocity!

[DOUBLED, RIGHT?]

@TopCat it doesn't where I live, either. It's Maths. :-)

@rickfreeman15 Probably, I was like 3 classes away from a minor in math. I've taken an necessary amount of math.

@NeonPanopticon I asked because the calculus sequence I know of stops at calc 3 and then there's diff equations, linear algebra and all that stuff. How much of it do you use at your job?

@rickfreeman15 Absolutely fucking zero. I did linear algebra in Calc 4 I'm pretty sure.

@Lostpoet so algebra

@Peapod I loved trig

@fortycreek I loved Algebra. It's like solving a puzzle which I like doing. 🤗

@Peapod trig same for me, similar in a way

@Chevy454 I can understand that because I didn't enjoy it either, at school. That was mainly because I found it so difficult but also I think because it seemed to have no clear purpose other than merely an examinations subject. I was also put off it by a couple of the teachers.

I regret that now, because it ended my early dream of becoming an professional scientist or engineer - both, of course, highly mathematical. I did work in these areas, but at semi-skilled shop-floor level for the Degree and PhD holders.

Thankfully you are honest, admitting your personal dislike of the subject. A few on SW hide behind abusing the subject itself, sometimes in potty-mouthed language - evidently missing the irony that without mathematics we would not have the Internet, nor indeed electricity!

Or almost everything we all so easily take for granted every day, even if we personally use only simple arithmetic and perhaps some mensuration with its basic geometry, trigonometry, masses, areas and volumes.


Curiously, many people who discuss maths education on SW - and elsewhere I have seen - seem to divide it artificially into hermetic subjects: algebra, trig, calculus etc. I have never understood why, because mathematics is a coherent discipline whose many different topics inter-relate with many others, in many ways.

I believe schools now try to show mathematics as the everyday but fundamental foundation for science, engineering and a good many other fields of life. Including of course, medical science and engineering...

@ImperialAerosolKidFromEP complex analysis? Whew😅 Cauchy-Riemanm equations was a nightmare