I can't agree more. Math is about intuition of what the symbols are doing. In the case of functions, intuition about how the symbols are transforming the input. I've always thought I was "bad at math." It wasn't until my late 20's when I took it upon myself to get better at calculus and I used "Calculus Success in 20 Minute a Day[0]" did I finally realize why I was "bad" at it; I never understood what I was doing.
That series of book really put intuition at the forefront. I began to realize that the crazy symbols and formulas were stand-in for living, breathing dynamic systems: number transformers. Each formula and symbol represented an action. Once I understood Math as a way to encode useful number transformation, it all clicked. Those rules and functions were encoded after a person came up with something they wanted to do. The formula or function is merely a compact way of describing this dynamic system to other people.
The irony was I always thought math was boring. In retrospect it was because it was taught as if it had no purpose other than to provide useless mental exercise. Once I started realizing that derivatives are used all around me to do cool shit, I was inspired to learn how they worked because I wanted to use them to do cool shit too. I went through several years of math courses and none of them even attempted to tell me that math was just a way to represent cool real world things. It took a $10 used book from amazon to do that. Ain't life grand?
That series of book really put intuition at the forefront. I began to realize that the crazy symbols and formulas were stand-in for living, breathing dynamic systems: number transformers. Each formula and symbol represented an action. Once I understood Math as a way to encode useful number transformation, it all clicked. Those rules and functions were encoded after a person came up with something they wanted to do. The formula or function is merely a compact way of describing this dynamic system to other people.
The irony was I always thought math was boring. In retrospect it was because it was taught as if it had no purpose other than to provide useless mental exercise. Once I started realizing that derivatives are used all around me to do cool shit, I was inspired to learn how they worked because I wanted to use them to do cool shit too. I went through several years of math courses and none of them even attempted to tell me that math was just a way to represent cool real world things. It took a $10 used book from amazon to do that. Ain't life grand?
[0]:https://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Success-20-Minutes-Day/dp/15...