HACKER Q&A
📣 uejfiweun

Is it possible to develop a mathematical intuition later in life?


Hello, HN. I'm a 26 year old guy, and lately I've been feeling like my full stack job is a bit of a dead end. I'm really excited by the current generation of ML stuff, however, and so I'm attempting somewhat of a pivot into this space to try to get back my motivation.

But I'm running into a problem almost immediately, which is that it's taking way too much effort for me to understand the math behind things. I never took Linear or MV or pretty much any hardcore math classes in college. I did well in Calc 2 but otherwise just took mostly stats courses to fulfill my requirements for the BS CS. So now I'm being exposed to all these new concepts like matrix transpositions and partial derivatives and I get the basic gist of things, but I really don't have the kind of intuition required to read those formulas like I can read code. And it's kind of making me doubt my ability to pivot to ML at all.

My question is, can one acquire this sort of mathematical intuition later in life? How can one do so? Is it even worth it? (should I give up on my ML dreams and just go be a lawyer?) Thanks!

  👤 turtleyacht Accepted Answer ✓
Yes, and you have an advantage versus your past self: programming ability.

Math can be modeled in software. Look at Mathematica. If math and computation are so different, how could the latter render the former?

Write code to reflect your growing understanding, and you may develop your own intuition.

Check out math videos too. By their nature, videos visualize the abstract; this will help you piggyback on existing imagination.

Math Overflow to look at math questions will also help. At first, it may be a slog, but it's an easy way to stretch your brain with new vocabulary.

You never know what may work. Try everything. Even smashing Schaum's Outlines.

👤 rhelz
You are quite as capable of learning now as you ever were. You just have to budget more time. Not because you got worse at learning, but because you already know so much. Whenever you learn something new, your brain has to reconcile it with what you already learned (or mislearned!). You have to undo more of the prejudices you've picked up, you have to resolve the cognative dissonance which comes from realizing that you've been wrong.

Sometimes this causes profound crisis, as when changing/losing religion, or allegiance to political party or economic system. You have been warned :-)

But if you want it, you can learn it. It is yours for the taking.

👤 akhayam
Agree that you are not behind. Having said that, I am generally a believer of the "10K hours rule" to get really really good at something: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4662388/.

So you better be ready to put in those hours.

👤 xupybd
Yeah you totally can. Even when you get to later in life :p

You're 26! You are still so young!

The only thing that I find holds me back is other commitments. Now that I have a family studying something new is much harder. If you have the time there is nothing holding you back. You probably have better discipline now and will find it easier.

👤 version_five
Take a real, in-person course.

You can find stuff online, but the depth, order of presentation, quality of explanations, are all worse, and you get none of the structure and motivation that comes with taking real courses. That's the main reason people learn better in university (along with dedicating the time) not age.

👤 timonoko
You dont have to understand anything, just learn to use them and fake the comprehension part.

I was 60, when I finally realized what Fourier-transform actually means by watching mechanical wave analyzer on Youtube.