<p>In order to learn Math, one do not have to be a genius, and the comparison to athletes and other mathematician is irreverent, when it comes to learning math.</p>
<p>I don’t think I ever said anything about having to be a genius. Obviously the more talent or affinity you have for math the better. I still disagree. I don’t believe that everyone can learn math to the same level just through hard work. The same as, through hard work, that anyone could build a world-class webpage. Some do the coding, some do the layout and design. There are some talented enough to do both but usually the ones doing the coding aren’t all that artistically inclined and those that do the layout couldn’t do the code.</p>
<p>u really gotta be super nerdy with an interest in math to even have a shot at doing well (decent gpa ~3.4) in a math major</p>
<p>Weasel8488, I am not sure if your post was addressed to me, but just to clarify, I am a current math major who considers going to grad school.</p>
<p>The section I quoted initially struck me because I didn’t experience real analysis to be that difficult, and at the same time I am aware that math classes at my college are less rigorous than math classes at Princeton. Wait, I should rephrase that. Our math classes are rigorous but less intense/difficult than math classes at most equally or more selective colleges. </p>
<p>I am having a really hard time imagining what a more intense math course, or a more intense (grad) program, would feel like, and the section from the graduate school guide I quoted slightly scared me.</p>
<p>Thanks for all of your responses, even the ones that went off-topic. To contribute to the discussion above, I believe talent is mostly acquired through practice with a little bit of inborn talent/luck. I came to that conviction after spending a summer implementing a neural network simulation program and trying to teach artificial networks different tasks. We initialized the networks with a small degree of randomness, and most networks needed about the same amount of time to learn each task. But in each experiment there were a few outliers - networks that never managed to learn the given task, or that outperformed all other networks (e.g. only needed 100 training steps instead of 1,000).</p>
<p>basically math is a HARD major
even if you LOVE it, you better be on top of your **** or it will plummet onto you</p>
<p>@b@r!um: No my post #20 was addressed to Gil who said he was thinking of majoring in math. I have no doubt that you’re already familiar with all the topics I brought up and apologize if it seemed as if I was implying otherwise. :)</p>
<p>@kmzizzle: I don’t think being nerdy has anything to do with it. Maybe there’s a correlation, but it’s certainly not a necessary condition.</p>
<p>Hahaha sorry, don’t know why but I didn’t even see Gil’s post 
Never mind!</p>
<p>But, then you have different branches of math (well, I know most of you guy already know this) where one could be good or need a lot of time to pick up the material in math various branches. What I’m saying is that in order to learn math, one do not have to gifted. Moreover, the comparison to Mathematicians is an unfair one since the OP topic was on learning Math. However, I guess this is another CC phenomenon where you have to be a genius to succeed.</p>
<p>I agree very much with what you said about one’s ability differing across the various branches of math. But I didn’t really understand the rest of your post because your last sentence seems to contradict everything else. Could you maybe clarify things?</p>
<p>You don’t have to be a genius to succeed and you are correct, you don’t have to be a genius to learn math. The argument came about because it was stated much earlier in the thread:</p>
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<p>I don’t disagree that hard work pays off but to say that innate abilities don’t matter or make a difference is wrong. I don’t care how hardI started studying mathematics…I couldn’t do what Einstein or Euler or Fermat did.</p>
<p>As for Oiram I think he is referring to the fact that everyone on here either claims to be a genius or disses those who aren’t. Something close to that. I’m sure he’ll chime back in.</p>
<p>Math is hard…but if you’re addicted to math and for some strange reason enjoy doing it, then it’s fun :)</p>