An unexpectedly pleasant result of teaching myself some abstract algebra and number theory is that I get to properly indulge my inner child, who is deeply resentful that anyone ever demanded that she believe something based on appeal to authority.
Despite being moved into "two years ahead of most kids" math starting around age 13, until I hit some theoretical computer science stuff in college, it was mostly practical technique and very little proof and hard for me to fake interest in.
@recursive Most work with proofs doesn't start in the academic sequence until upper-division university.
Lower-division calculus and differential equations courses drove me away from math for nearly a decade. (I have since done a BS in Math and three years of graduate work.)
Also I'm kind of low-key annoyed that I learned of transcendental numbers when I was 13 but I didn't learn that the set of transcendental numbers has the same cardinality as the set of real numbers until two days ago
(TBH, most of the practically-orineted engineering and computer programming-related math technique that was actually worthwhile to me was limited to signal processing courses and a numerical analysis course.)
@recursive I was very lucky to take these in the opposite order…which surprised the hell out of my college abstract algebra teacher when he had a student who was deeply bored, didn’t attend class, and finished the exams in half the allotted time because they’d been doing it for a decade already
(I also nearly failed pre-calc, so…I get it. I lucked out and my inner child got dessert early.)
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