Nah. I was labeled a dumb kid in high school because I had to work 40 hours a week. I went back to college as an adult and now have a masters in mech Eng.
Went to my high school reunion and the smart kids were largely abject failures. They never really struggled until college, then mostly failed out. I felt bad for them, but not too bad since most of them bullied me.
Sounds like maybe there weren't the true smart kids. You finished high-school while working a full time job. You were capable and adaptable. Fuck them :)
As one of the resident smart kids who went into CompSci and now works as a software engineer, I haven't touched any of this for a hot minute. I mainly use it for 3D print designs once in a blue moon.
Of course it depends, but for example, it CSS esing functions are based on polinomial or sin waves. If you ever want to understand or perhaps implement and easing function, trigonometry has your back.
I was thinking this myself. sin, cos, tan. Have not used. I have use euler coordinates so thats something but really solve for x is the most advanced thing I have used outside of school. mmmm actually I guess some statistics like stadard deviation.
Programmer for 25 years. Only time I have ever used math more complicated than simple multiply/divide was... actually never.
That one time when I copy/pasted a formula for linear interpolation, was still just multiplication and division. And I still have no idea how it works.
I've even done OpenGL and graphics programming and still haven't needed any algebra/trig/etc, although I don't do complex 3D rendering or physics or anything like that.
I wish I knew how to do cool programming stuff like draw circles and waves and stuff though, but I've never seen a tutorial that didn't go WAY over my head immediately.
And then I had to write some software that needed to visualise a rotary milking platform which is a circle, divided into segments, with different parts of each segment showing different things at different times.
Oh, and since it's rotary, the circle had to be animated and rotate in sync with the actual milking platform.
Oh and different clients had different numbers of bays in their platforms so I couldn't hardcode anything, it had to dynamically draw the platform, animate it and respond to events like window size change.
Suffice to say I had to drag highschool geometry out from the graveyard of my brain
Check out 3d graphics related stuff, there's a ton of geometry used there, whether you're ray tracing or using 2d projection.
A ray tracer is basically made up of:
ray caster algorithm to map pixels to rays and puts them into an image
data structures to contain scene data (like geometry, lighting, materials)
algorithm that represents a ray as a line and determines which parts of the scene geometry that line intersects with, selecting the one nearest and in front of the eye (or wherever the front is culled)
same algorithm used to determine if a ray from that intersection point to each light has anything between the point and light
also need to get the angle to the light for each ray that isn't blocked
a shading algorithm that uses the lights, materials, and angles (and maybe more info) to determine the colour of that ray
some code that does something with the resulting image, like display it or save to a file
And that's basically it. It will be slow without optimizations but it's cool af seeing your renders. And you can improve on it from there if you want. Though a warning: you might get obsessed with analysing different visual phenomena and thinking about how to render something like that for a while after doing this, which might also lead to gaining a critical eye for where 3d engines fail to be accurate.
I do almost everyday as a mechanical engineer. I even do the common angles in my head, which came in handy several times in situations where I’m sailing and something breaks underway etc
I hated all math classes before it, but I had a great teacher and something about the real-life usefulness (triangulation, navigation, etc) of trig clicked for me and I enjoyed it and made an A.
I fucking failed the shit out of statistics, and hilariously that's the most related to my real life job, where I'm dealing with gigantic data sets daily looking for outliers/trends.
Stats is intuitive but you need a pure math degree to even get started on the foundations (measure theory). Unintuitiveness arises in any subject where they refuse to explain how it works and just give you a bunch of magic formulas to calculate with. Stats just happens to be the most egregious example of this because it requires far more background than most people applying it actually want.
I still do occasionally. I don't study anything stem related. If you really want to use it you can think of thinks and it's nice to have been thought to be comfortable with numbers and functions and stuff.
I just had to do some “find the angle” geometry this week to quantify some physical stuff that was going on in addition to what the software was causing.
And by “do,” I mean scribbling some triangles to figure out what I was calculating, then throwing the numbers into an online calculator!
Math teachers, as a population, are abject failures. Every school day they do incalculable harm to the wellbeing of our society by taking everything in the fundamentals of instruction and doing the exact opposite. They not only fail to cause students to develop a functional understanding of the subject, they instill a pride in their students of that ignorance.
College math professors are no better and possibly worse. We call them "professors" because "teacher" is an incorrect descriptor. Very little teaching goes on in college classrooms.
If I taught flight school the way the typical high school math teacher teaches algebra, I'd be in prison for manslaughter at the very least. None of my students leave my classroom bragging about never needing the training I gave them.
"I said everything about myself without saying a damn thing about the subject!"
You have zero idea of what you are talking about. Which is the sin of 0. So the more you speak, you just increase the times you are wrong. That's called frequency. If you use that, you can adjust the angle that you approach the subject and have more resonance with your audience.
I don't know if you listen to music though. Maybe you just stick to the Internet. Which also uses frequency. But maybe all this went over your head. Like a jet. Or a cell signal.
I've been a flight instructor since 2010, in 14 years not a single one of the pilots I trained has ever come back to me bragging about how they never use something I taught them. Or failed a test I endorsed them for. I'm a damn good teacher of technical subjects, certainly good enough to recognize a piss poor one.
this has a lot to do with resources and time. class size and student to teacher ratio will always have a huge impact on student learning. i really want to write that twice. plus in america, capitalism and zero-sum life is introduced in education by way of separating higher and lower scoring students, assigning students to 'gifted' classes. not being able to give enough support for students with disabilities, and separating them as well. and of course stability and support outside of the classroom/school is a big factor.
Granted, teaching 10 well-off adults is easier than 30 poor kids.
This doesn't explain why all math classes everywhere from about 6th grade and up are designed as if we're raising an entire generation of mathematicians. What good does memorizing proofs do? Why do we focus so much on the quadratic equation? Algebra is a useful skill that schools systematically beat a hatred for into the masses...in order to pretend they're doing something academic and scholarly?