On 25 May '08, at 11:58 AM, Hamish Allan wrote:
What this thread has reminded me of is an ongoing conversation I have with a friend of mine, who refuses to countenance the square root of minus one, because he doesn't think it means anything.
It also reminded me of the fact that Isaac Asimov never managed to learn calculus; he said it seemed like some conceptual wall he couldn't get over. Didn't stop him from getting a Ph.D in biochemistry, inventing thiotimoline and positronic AI, and writing a few hundred books on science...
I hit a similar wall in number theory, trying to understand finite fields. I managed to visualize how they worked for an hour or two while working on a homework set, but lost it after that, like some ecstatic vision of Heaven shown to a mystic, which he can never remember the details of afterwards.
In my case I dropped the class, and later my math major*. I hope that doesn't sound too discouraging. I somehow found plenty of interesting things to work on that didn't involve bijective isomorphisms of finite abelian groups.
I don't know what to suggest, Jonny ... I think we've all hit the limits of how vigorously we can wave our hands about the concept in an email thread. Taking a break from it would be a good idea, for all of us.
—Jens* to be honest, the math major dropped me. I was kind of crushed, actually. But she later saw the error of her ways, though I eventually married an astronomer.
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