Why do people suck at math? Mathematics with Edward Frenkel

Edward Frenkel - mathematics superstar and acclaimed author of the book "Love and Math". Edward Frenkel is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, which he joined in 1997 after being on the faculty at Harvard University. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and the winner of the Hermann Weyl Prize in mathematical physics. Frenkel’s research is on the interface of mathematics and quantum physics, with an emphasis on the Langlands Program, which he describes as a Grand Unified Theory of mathematics. He has authored three books and over 90 scholarly articles in academic journals, and he has lectured on his work around the world.

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[Shreyaagrawal_]

Prof frenkel is a genius his videos on numberphile made me fall in love with mathematics once again, can't thank him enough love him to bits . Thankyouuu sir

[aubreylindsey]

I Agree With Everything He Says About Why Some People Struggle With Math Including Me Because Math Is Not My Strong Suit.

[Chuck]

....another thing that changed my ideas about Math was reading a book, History of Mathematics.

[xavierkreiss]

Dr Frenkel is easily one of the most pleasant maths teachers I've heard. The important thing, he says, is the equation, "playing" ...but when I was a kid it was never fun, since I didn't understand what was going on. I found pleasure playing with words and languages, never with playing with numbers.
Contrary to what he says, I don't think that the way maths was taught (in my country, France) had anything to do with it since the other guys in my class managed well enough. There were usually only about two or three of us "nuls" out of a total of about 30.
I remember when I was a kid of 11, sitting through yet one more boring and incomprehensible maths lesson, this time about bout PGCDs and PPCMs (GCDs and LCMs).. I felt that it was deeply unfair: why was I forced to sit through this? I didn't understand what was being said, ansdonly brought me boredom, fear, and bad grades. I knew it was a waste of time since I would never need to know any of it anyhow. And I was right: I never did.
While in secondary school I was in a literary/humanities "stream". Today, in that kind of stream maths is optional in the last two years (before the baccalauréat and university). At last, its seems, someone took a good decision.

[WojciechowskaAnna]

The other problem with teaching mathematics - is to "FOLLOW FORMULAS". Teachers do let kids develop their own mental intuition to notice some obvious dependencies aka formulas. Instead they want kids to follow them blindly, changing math to some kind of symbol game - when some symbol is by set of tricks replaced by other symbols (what actually is done while program evaluating expression) - and this kind of cold, boring symbol manipulation is actually called "maths". It has nothing to do with real maths.