A math odyssey
Hooray! Today, with a battery of hyperbolas, I finished the last of the repetitive graphing exercises from the review of conics.
I was busy with a lot of other tasks, as well, because I’m leaving tomorrow on a trip with my family. I hope to do some math while I am gone, but I probably won’t be updating the blog, as I am not taking my laptop. Expect me back on Monday, 12 February.
First of all, if you are subscribed to post notifications, please note that those seem to be hit and miss. Not everyone is getting a notification for every post. I may have to find another notification tool. If I do, I will try to migrate the email addresses of those already signed up.
I got a late start today and was distracted by a lot of small tasks, so that I wasn’t able to sit down to study until evening. I did manage about an hour and a half of analytic geometry review, though. It’s going well. The concepts are coming back to me fairly easily. One thing I find curious is that circles are covered in the review chapter on basic analytic geometry, not the one on conics. That seems odd.
Part 2 of Revenge of the Squares will probably go up tomorrow. I don’t have the energy for it today.
I was tired today and took a long nap. My psychiatric medication is part of what makes this project possible, but it also makes me sleep more than normal. I did manage to read a chapter of Steven R. Lay’s Analysis with an Introduction to Proof, another one of my college math textbooks. (I kept them all.) I’ve decided to try to read it in parallel to my review of introductory calculus, since it covers most of the same concepts, but in a more rigorous way.
It seems my life is still my life. I woke up depressed today and have been struggling to do anything. I watched part of a video about quintic equations that I think will be very interesting another day, as well as a little more of the Essence of Calculus series. My concentration is poor, though, and I didn’t learn a lot. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.
The end of my time at college was traumatic, and since math was my major, it was inevitably swept up in the trauma. So much so that for the past 15 years I have had clear trauma responses whenever I tried to do math. Initially, I could not access math knowledge at all, as if it were behind a blank wall in my mind. Later, whenever I tried to think about it, I had shortness of breath, pounding heart, and shaking. Those symptoms gradually eased and haven’t troubled me for a couple of years. Math still caused me anxiety, however; I struggled to concentrate and ended up exhausted by even short periods of review.
Earlier this week, in consultation with my psychiatrist, I started using CBD-infused gummies while working on math. The results have been striking. Today I was able to study for almost two hours without ill effect. I think I may finally be in a position where I can reengage with the subject I loved so much.