> I have met people who claimed to be self taught in mathematics and it was obvious that they didn't really understand the concepts though they were absolutely convinced they knew what they were talking about.
This is an interesting contrast with my experience with learning programming, where, it doesn't matter how much formal education / training you get, you're still going to have to do a massive amount of self-learning before you can hope to achieve excellence.
All good programmers are self-taught. No good mathematicians (currently) are. I wonder why this is. Probably boils down to what 'math' is trying to accomplish vs. what 'programming' does.
This is an interesting contrast with my experience with learning programming, where, it doesn't matter how much formal education / training you get, you're still going to have to do a massive amount of self-learning before you can hope to achieve excellence.
All good programmers are self-taught. No good mathematicians (currently) are. I wonder why this is. Probably boils down to what 'math' is trying to accomplish vs. what 'programming' does.