Academic priorities 319

I agree. That's why I lost it in my second year of university. Math turned into a series of seemingly arbitrary steps that I couldn't relate to the real world - and at that point it went from merely difficult to incomprehensible. If only I had known then, for instance, how matrices could be used to rotate Cartesian co-ordinates, I might have been able to keep up with linear algebra. On the other hand, one of my physics clbuttes was dealing with electricity - and suddenly complex numbers were transformed from mere mental masturbation into something practical and delightful.

I'm sure I'd still be much more into math if I had been able to make real-world connections. As it was, losing it - after growing up your typical high-school geek - was one of my life's more traumatic experiences.

So in the end I left and became a computer programmer. :-) But only in buttembly language - the computer science department's obsession with high-level languages was just as bad as the math department's shunning of the real world. (Mind you, the CS department was a subsidiary of math at the time...)

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