math is actually a scam. nobody knows what an integrand or an antiderivative is - they’re all just pretending in order to seem smart. all those Wikipedia pages? pure technobabble. all that weird squiggly notation? no rhyme or reason at all

that’s why all math technobabble is exclusively explained in terms of more math technobabble. there are no plain English axioms that everyone can understand - it’s technobabble all the way down

if math could be explained in a way that everyone can understand it would be called physics

computer science: a quaternion is an angle

mathematicians: nono you see a quaternion is a four-dimensional associative normed division algebra over the real numbers

computer science: a normalized vector is 2-3 numbers that add up to 1. it’s a helpful way of defining a direction, like a character’s travel direction in a video game. they’re actually really easy to calculate and understand

mathematicians: ummm no actually there’s no such thing as a normalized vector, but a unit vector is defined as [eldritch garbled equations with no further context or elaboration]

@kasdeya as someone who does enjoy a lot of math, this pains us in our soul just a bit (/lighthearted)

@tempest aw that’s very fair. I get so frustrated by math because it feels impossible for me to learn anything about it by googling. like if I have a question about chemistry or economics or sociology or computer science I can probably find an answer within 10 minutes if not faster, but for math it seems like you have to learn it in a predetermined order through one textbook after another and that is just extremely not my learning style tbh