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I find this concept of being a numbers person weird to being good at math. Most math is about symbol manipulation and numbers are really only at the end.



> Most math is about symbol manipulation and numbers are really only at the end.

During the first semester at uni, the math prof was going through some non-trivial (at that stage) "real-world" example involving definite integrals.

After what felt like 10 minutes of manipulating integrals and such we got to the final "x = ..." equation, upon which he turned away from the blackboard and said "and then you can just plug in the numbers and calculate the result, but that's not really interesting". And so the lecture continued...


Middle School / High School: "What are these letters doing in my math?!"

Post University: "What are these numbers doing in my math?!"


Here numbers are always in the beginning (of each chapter as the chapter number....)




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