This is not true at all. I know many people in mathematics that are below average when it comes to arithmetic, some to the point of suffering from dyscalcula. I myself am probably in at least the bottom quartile of arithmetic ability, and there have been quite a few historic examples of top mathematicians with a similar "problem", Hilbert being a common example.

There's a huge difference between reasoning about abstract statements and arithmetic calculation, even when it comes to abstract statements about arithmetic. I'm not saying there's no correlation, but the conditioned probability in the direction of bad at arithmetic => bad at mathematical reasoning is probably much lower than you'd expect.

At the very least, I'd encourage those that are bad at arithmetic to not assume they will be bad at mathematics or data science. If I had, I'd be much worse off and less happy than I am now with math in my life :)

Hilbert's supposed dyscalcula is a myth..unless you have a source we haven't seen?

It's similar to the Grothendeick story -- a mathematician making a simple mistake -- that get exaggerated to "mathematicians can't do arithmetic." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/57_(number)

Another common myth was that Einstein was bad at math, because he (and others) had trouble in school because the material was too easy and he quarreled with teachers, and "failed" tests for early college admissions administered in a foreign language. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/02/...

When a mathematician confesses being bad at calculation, they don't mean "couldn't pass high school", they mean compared to their elite peers.

You're right, it looks like that is a myth (I remember seeing it on this math stackexchange question[1], which is actually a great example of some mathematicians' opinions on the matter).

There's a wide margin between "couldn't pass high school" and "had difficulty with math in high school". And I've known plenty who confessed that were quite explicit that was not what they meant (e.g. by comparing themselves unfavorably with their children).

[1]: http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/551074/are-all-mathe...

Math is taught so poorly that I am rather skeptical that this generalizes. I was fairly terrible at math ( although I scored well on tests and was able to struggle through it ) until I was in a junior year course that was used for discrete math, which went into proofs, and from that point on, it was simply no longer a problem.

But because I was specialized towards mathematics, I had been ... "inconvenienced" in favor of "easier" courses for the non-specialists. I think there's a severely unexamined premise in that state of affairs - but I have to ask - would others be as math-phobic if they really knew how it worked?

The head of the math/sci department literally said "Calculus keeps the dumb people outta med school" - and he was only partly kidding.

The question is - is rigor, even partial, informal rigor ( if that even makes any sense ) of value to everyone or not? It's obviously painful. But it really helps with goal of not being a sucker.

I suspect the relationship between school maths and what mathematicians do is a little bit like the relationship between touch typing and programming, in the sense they're separate skills but being good at one of those skills reduces friction with the other.

I'm not sure about this one. I studied CS and was kinda forced to learn university-level maths and I found that it differs both on the pedagogical level (different ways to motivate students, I preferred the ones in the university) and on the logical level, when for the first time in my life I was actually EXPLAINED the terms we operated on.

University maths is much more logical than the school voodoo I had.

I didn't quite have this experience in my engineering math courses. Admittedly, the other math courses were much better about this.

I wouldn't bet on that, they are really different.

Some of the most blatantly off-putting characteristics of school math, like mindless repetition, are antagonical to real math.

Orthogonal?

Sorry. I meant antagonistic.

High School math (often) is all about memorizing a few tricks from the analysis of real numbers and maybe elementary number theory/combinatorics. I think there'd be more mathematicians if people got to see what math is like in actuality. I fell in love with math when I discovered that it's an actual body of knowledge complete with definitions, concepts and proofs just like any other discipline. Compared to that high school math (loosely) could be said to be a bunch of party tricks with no rhyme or reason to them.