Whenever I am not convinced that I’m learning things, I try to think back to things I know now that I definitely did not understand at various points in my life. It’s always really easy to look at things you do now that made no sense 15 years ago. The interesting bit for me is trying to narrow down that window, maybe to the year it occured to me.
Somethings did not occur to me early enough. It was not until college that I understand that the performance of 99% of the code you write would never matter. Matrices were things I never learned formally in high school. I somehow tutored someone on how to find determinants, but I never really did anything with them until college. I guess these things are more textbook than fundamental concepts. More interesting points may be, for example, the idea that for any group of 366 people, 2 people must have the same birthday. I don’t think the reasoning behind it clicked for me until high school. Or that multiplication was really just addition, not some table you memorize. That clicked in 6th grade or so.
I remember taking Government AP in high school and learning all these things about how our government functioned. Lobbyists always baffled me. I did not understand why they were even mentioned in a textbook. Don’t they just bribe people? My girlfriend and I had a long conversation about how our immune system works. Until you actually dig into the science, your immune system is just some magic force field that somehow prevents you from getting the same sickness twice.
I’m in a class, Geometric Algorithms, and somehow the inverse Ackerman function showed up. I hope I learn a lot of stuff this quarter.
Leave a comment