JWScube: When people think about Mathematics

For the first post in this blog, I would like to start it with something light, casual and interesting.

I am a mathematics student. However, sometimes I would wonder why I had chosen to further my study in mathematics. In primary school, mathematics to me is all about calculations. If you are good in calculating, then you are good in mathematics. However, in secondary school, mathematics is the combination of calculations and formulas. If you could memories all the usage of formulas, then you are good in mathematics. Finally, in pre-university school, we tend to learn more. We did our assignments related to the applications of mathematics in real life. For example, we use vector to calculate the departure and arrival time of ship, we use probability to calculate the chances of getting a desire output and etc. Until then only we start to understand a little bit more about mathematics.

Now, as a mathematics student, when I introduce myself to the others, people will ask

or they define math as

Sometimes, some people might even fed up with mathematics because they couldn't understand the given question or situation.

To them, solving mathematics problems are like this

Even though I'm a mathematics students, sometimes I would also think like this

However, this is what we are supposed to learn in University.

In university, we learn from the basic. We encountered with basic proving methods, calculus, linear algebra and probability. It was not so tough at the beginning but when we study further, mathematics really need to be understand but no more memorizing. The way we study mathematics before is not applicable anymore at this stage. We seldom use calculator in university because we are not trained to master in calculation but we are trained to proof and understand the equations. This is the major difference between mathematics in secondary and tertiary level.

How does it looks like to be a maths student.