thoughtfunction

If you want people to understand that numbers are concepts / descriptions of something potentially infinite, and that it's ok to totally work with non-finite describable numbers without ever really writing out their values, just fucking start with that. I honestly think the start of most undergrad math curriculums should be a logic & foundations class with proofs, sets, number theory and the whole "numbers are more logical concepts, not really specific values" vs. calculus. Then teach calculus, with a big dose of 'what is infinity, really?'.

I think it's actually a great disservice and the hand wave that most calculus math classes do about those exact concepts really fucks over a lot of people. It makes calculus a weed out class because the fundamentals are not explained properly so a good amount of people just go into it as yet another thing they have to ape without real understanding. And for the people who don't work well with things they half understand, they really struggle, like I did. It really made my computer science degree a lot worse, because of the instance of starting all undergrad math with hand wavy calculus, for 3 or 4 classes.

I even wrote blog articles about it, it was probably the worse part of my computer science degree, and if math education was done differently where they didn't handwave, I probably would've had a much better time.