In Reply to: Infinity posted by Xpentium on November 05, 2006 at 02:06:09:
I don't consider myself a real mathematician, if that means someone who does theoretical math and physics, but I'm no longer convinced of the "special brain" argument you made. I used to believe this, that people needed to use a special part of the brain to do math and that I had a majorly underdeveloped or even handicapped brain in that regard.
Then I met Sister Conrad Monrad, who taught a course that I've always called Math for Poets. At the time I was a literature major and struggled endlessly to get through the most basic college level math course. I kept signing up, then dropping the class midway through the semester because I feared failure and felt like I wasn't getting it.
My problem wasn't math, my problem was math anxiety, and Conrad Mondrad (her real name) finally got through to me: You can do it. The same brain that reads a piece of literature and undertands the use of language & imagery is the same brain that you bring to a math problem. It's just a matter of patience and practice.
Later on, I discovered statistics. I'm no statistics professor by a long shot, but I have enough mastery of the subject to be a fairly decent card player.
Finally, there is no such thing as normal. There's just central tendancy and distribution in a given sample of human beings. What we might consider abnormal (3 standard deviations) could be dead center of the bell curve on a different population sample.
By the way, I liked the Cantor sets problem you shared. It is interesting to think about, although I'm not sure it beats U.S. politics for entertainment value.