getting over math phobia

[Owlie]

I didn't really appreciate math except as a way to get to a finite number until I took abstract algebra in my senior year. Probably the most useful (and still the most (and most favorably) remembered math class I took. I had a hard time with the abstract concepts of random X, Y, and Z representing some ill-defined quantities. But when I got into p-chem and those abstract variables turned into pressure, temperature, volume, and concentration, something I could clearly relate to, it all made a lot better sense and my ability to deal with it sharply improved. But I still remember in the first semester of p-chem, memorizing all the steps of a thermodynamic derivation the same way some people would memorize a poem, just so's I could scribble it all down on the Friday exams ;-)

Similar to my experience. Chemistry-math made far more sense to me than math-math, at least in part because there were units attached to most of these variables. Didn't really help me with p-chem 2, though.

[OakLeaf]

That's funny, because I had the exact opposite experience.

By now I've forgotten 95% of the math I ever learned, but as a very abstract thinker, what I do remember is sailing through multivariate calculus while the engineering students struggled to visualize six dimensions.