#discretemaths

NOSTALGIA UK

Sometimes it's not easy to be Discrete (1994)

I must admit, back in Jenan (my secondary school), Additional Maths for me was all about memorising formulas and spending endless hours applying them to sample exam questions. I actually found it fun—breaking down my "answer-finding" process into multiple lines of partial derivations to get to the value of x or y. It was never about solving problems—just about getting the right answer, if you know what I mean.

So when I started attending Discrete Mathematics classes with Dr. David Pitt, my brain just couldn’t handle it. Suddenly, it wasn’t about plugging numbers into formulas anymore—it was about solving real problems. And that’s when my mind jammed. I felt completely lost, like an idiot. It hit me that I had never really trained my brain to think logically or solve problems—I had only trained it to find answers.

It took me quite a while to finally get the hang of logical mathematical problem-solving. There were moments when I felt like giving up—especially when we got into topics like recursion (I can’t quite recall its mathematical equivalent). Anyone who has done programming knows what I mean—it’s one of those concepts that doesn’t come naturally to everyone. It’s easy to get sucked so deep into it that you would struggle to find your way out.

Dr. Pitt’s lectures were always held in a large lecture theatre since his students came from various courses, I presume mostly those doing Maths & Statistics. And I have to say—he was quite a character. Not because of his words, but because of his movements and gestures when lecturing. It was as if he was performing some kind of quirky dance routine 😆.

In the end, I think I finally managed to wrap my head somehow around Discrete Maths—at least most of it. And yes, some bits of it did turn out to be useful later on when I started working with algorithms and programming codes.