Re:How good were you at college?
by DaniFong on Wednesday November 14, 2007 @08:52PM
(#79938)
You totally have the option of just pretending community college never happened. Just don't mention that you were ever there.
I got fairly lucky with community college: there was another really bright student there. He coded a 3d engine in ASM. So I learned a lot from him.
I didn't guess that you wanted to study math, though it's not much of a guess that you'd like it.
The thing about math departments at research universities is that the field has largely been written by ex-prodigies (each textbook seems to include a mini-bio on galois...), and they don't care much for rules or structure since much of the faculty had to struggle with such artificial things anyway.
So I tended to have a lot of luck talking with math departments. I was quite a writer back then too -- better than the pupils of the English department, it seemed, but there I really doubt I would have gained the traction I had gained with the math department.
By the way, if you don't read Scott Aaronson or Terry Tao, I strongly suggest that you do -- they're wonderful bloggers, and Scott has a terrific (though unfinished) set of notes called Quantum Computing since Democritus. A book you might really like is "What is mathematics" by Courant -- it's wonderful.
I got fairly lucky with community college: there was another really bright student there. He coded a 3d engine in ASM. So I learned a lot from him.
I didn't guess that you wanted to study math, though it's not much of a guess that you'd like it.
The thing about math departments at research universities is that the field has largely been written by ex-prodigies (each textbook seems to include a mini-bio on galois...), and they don't care much for rules or structure since much of the faculty had to struggle with such artificial things anyway.
So I tended to have a lot of luck talking with math departments. I was quite a writer back then too -- better than the pupils of the English department, it seemed, but there I really doubt I would have gained the traction I had gained with the math department.
By the way, if you don't read Scott Aaronson or Terry Tao, I strongly suggest that you do -- they're wonderful bloggers, and Scott has a terrific (though unfinished) set of notes called Quantum Computing since Democritus. A book you might really like is "What is mathematics" by Courant -- it's wonderful.