Things I have forgotten
You know how people sometimes say ‘I have forgotten more about X than you’ll ever know!’? I was just looking over my previous blog entries and realized that I’ve forgotten more over the course of my undergraduate career than I’ve retained. Which isn’t to say that I’ve learned nothing, just that of every 10 things I’ve learned I’ve forgotten about 7.
Examples: I used to love Perl and Scheme, but I’ve completely forgotten Perl and I would say I’ve completely forgotten Scheme, except its syntax is too simple to forget. I was once much more facile with reasoning about sequences and series, but now I tend to struggle with them. Most alarmingly, I just took a real analysis course a year ago, and I forgot about half of it already… most of the measure theory, and a good bit of the functional analysis/topological vector space stuff.
The problem as I see it is that I need to keep actively using knowledge, more so than most people I’ve met, or I’ll lose it. Probably a side effect of the amount of reading I do. Apparently, reading math books can be bad for you.
Possibly relevant posts:
- Princeton Lectures in Analysis (10/9/2006)
- Folland for the weekend (3/30/2007)
- Winter Reading (12/4/2006)