I eat corn like an an analyst, and I am an analyst. I also use vim over emacs, like Lisp, and find object-oriented programming weirdly distasteful.
However I don’t think analysis and algebra are usually lumped together and opposed to geometry; my understanding was that traditionally algebra, analysis, and geometry were the three main fields of math.
I tend to think of the distinctions within math as about how much we posit that we know about the objects we work with. The objects of study of mathematical logic are very general and thus can be very “perverse”; the objects of study of algebra and topology are also quite general; the objects of study of geometry are more pinned down because you have a metric; the objects of study of analysis are the ”best behaved” of all, because they have smoothness and integrability properties.
I find analysis much easier than algebra because I rely a lot on the concreteness of being able to measure, estimate, and (sometimes) visualize. People who are more algebra-oriented are more likely than me to become irritated by doing fiddly computations, but they have more ability to reason about very abstract objects.
No, I also definitely wouldn’t lump mathematical analysis in with algebra… I’ve edited the post now as that was confusing, also see this reply.
Your ‘how much we know about the objects’ distinction is a good one and I’ll think about it.
Also vim over emacs for me, though I’m not actually great at either. I’ve never used Lisp or Haskell so can’t say. Objects aren’t distasteful for me in themselves, and I find Javascript-style prototypal inheritance fits my head well (it’s concrete-to-abstract, ‘examples first’), but I find Java-style object-oriented programming annoying to get my head around.
I eat corn like an an analyst, and I am an analyst. I also use vim over emacs, like Lisp, and find object-oriented programming weirdly distasteful.
However I don’t think analysis and algebra are usually lumped together and opposed to geometry; my understanding was that traditionally algebra, analysis, and geometry were the three main fields of math.
I tend to think of the distinctions within math as about how much we posit that we know about the objects we work with. The objects of study of mathematical logic are very general and thus can be very “perverse”; the objects of study of algebra and topology are also quite general; the objects of study of geometry are more pinned down because you have a metric; the objects of study of analysis are the ”best behaved” of all, because they have smoothness and integrability properties.
I find analysis much easier than algebra because I rely a lot on the concreteness of being able to measure, estimate, and (sometimes) visualize. People who are more algebra-oriented are more likely than me to become irritated by doing fiddly computations, but they have more ability to reason about very abstract objects.
No, I also definitely wouldn’t lump mathematical analysis in with algebra… I’ve edited the post now as that was confusing, also see this reply.
Your ‘how much we know about the objects’ distinction is a good one and I’ll think about it.
Also vim over emacs for me, though I’m not actually great at either. I’ve never used Lisp or Haskell so can’t say. Objects aren’t distasteful for me in themselves, and I find Javascript-style prototypal inheritance fits my head well (it’s concrete-to-abstract, ‘examples first’), but I find Java-style object-oriented programming annoying to get my head around.