Originally Posted by Jordan~
I'm very good at maths, but it's boooooooo-
-oooooring. Dull as sin. Grinding numbers is stupidly easy and repetitive. I should clarify, I'm really talking about maths classes. I'd usually ignore the teacher and start working on some problem I'd notice, that would entertain me a lot. I never got any work done all year, then worked out everything I needed to know for the exam from the basics while I was doing it. Difficult equations are pretty fun to solve, especially when you have no idea how to solve them. "I'd probably kick ass at math if I actually gave a shit about it" sounds about right.
Science is quite dull to me, as well. That is, the actual practice of science. I couldn't care less about control groups and all that tedious, pedantic and painfully necessary nonsense; it's the most servile, frustrating and practical rubbish in the world. What's interesting is the products of science. I'm glad there are people who actually enjoy performing experiments - let's call them masochists - since without them, I wouldn't be able to philosophise about what they find out. Or imagine its implications, which leads on to...
English and the arts. I love these. Metaphor is multi-layered language, and language is multi-layered maths. Take maths beyond its most complex point, to a place where numbers are abstract and meaningless and axioms barely seem to apply, and you have the arts. The analysis of a text and the intuitive intelligence required therefor is far more advanced than simple number crunching. Two numbers interacting in a certain way will always produce identical results, whereas the same two words appearing next to eachother on a page can mean more things than one could count in a lifetime. Analysing the products of the arts is like looking at a blackboard covered in numbers and intuitively understanding, if not 'knowing' definitively, the result. While maths may be the most pure field (it's not, philosophy is), its most advanced and beautiful application is art.
Have you done any math beyond 'number crunching'? Solving equations and the rules are boring, at that level its basically learning how to use a tool. Statistics and accounting... that sort of boring stuff... not so great...
There's math of much more significant interest. Gödel's incompleteness theorem comes to mind, along with Cellular Automata... simple rules that produce stunning complexity.
Its not really about complexity with math either. It's about taking simple basic ideas to their logic conclusion, finding connections where you don't suspect there to be any. Using a creative insight to look at something in a different way.
Math loses its luster when interesting developments have already been developed. The arts keep on changing and coming up with new means of expression. You need to actually do Math that's challenging, difficult and undiscovered to get what's really great about it, I think. At the fringes of understanding is when Math comes alive, the unanswered questions in math have a quality that's different than anything else. They have a mysterious quality, like they transcend everything... and yet when they are proven they must be true. No other field really gets results that must be true like math does.
How interesting would the arts be if you spent all day learning grammar rules, the color wheel and music theory while never writing, reading, painting, viewing art, playing music, or listening to music?
I agree with you on Science though, running experiments is very boring. Too much detail muddles the fun...