Mathematic as an individual with asperger.

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I kind of have a love-hate relationship with math like im real good at basic elemtary level and mental math but i am really lousy at abstract math like algebra trig and calculus.

I believed this has to do with visualization, at least for me. I typically excel at science, where I can visualize easily, but when it comes to math I cannot visualize it. It is the same with foreign languages. Different people are wired differently. Look at Temple Grandin, she is an autistic savant who excelled at science due to her insane ability to visualize, but was terrible at math. She could not visualize it. I am the same way, but not on the same scale as her. She is one of a kind.

I don't hate math but I've always been incredibly poor at math. In fact I've always struggled with all the subjects Aspies are 'supposed to' be great at, like computer technology, science and foreign languages. I even sucked at my FAVOURITE subject too, which was music. I was good at playing the keyboard but I didn't know anything about music or how to read music, and I failed in my music exams I took. I was good at art as well, but I failed at that for being TOO CREATIVE!

I'm pretty good in practical math-----but suck at theoretical math.

I majorly struggled with all those things as well probably because of my various disabilities. I just wanted to take the easiest classes I could when I had any choice on it. I never took any foreign languages or music classes in school for that very reason. Struggling with all that stuff is a major reason I had NO desire to go to college & I never really had a clue what to do with my life. If one thing says I should have a certain strength, something else says I'm really bad at it. We had a career thing my senior year of high-school where we selected two presentations to listen to for different careers & I selected Music & Private Investigator because they seemed the most interesting compared to the other things like Stockbroker, just thinking about being a stockbroker makes me want to bang my head into a wall Everyone who took the music one including me was majorly disappointed with it though because it was about repairing & selling music instruments. We were hoping for something more with the music entertainment industry like recording & mastering CDs, running a record store, being a DJ for a radio station, managing a pop music star & such things. I tried learning to play guitar when I was in middle school but my instructor was very unreliable & I struggled with the hand coordination & remembering what to do so I got frustrated & quickly gave up & eventually sold it. I actually was a DJ for an online radio station YEARS ago for a brief period. I struggled with the software but I had a pretty big music collection on my computer & I usually set the songs up at least a couple in advance so I had a little breathing room. I was mostly allowed to play whatever I wanted as long as it fell in the rock or comedy categories. I quit DJing because I started my 3rd job after quitting my 2nd job half a year before. The station shut down sometime during the 3 months I had that job & I was not in the loop with things since I had quit. Some like me were just doing it for fun to pass time & others were doing it for experience because they wanted to work at an actual radio station when they graduated college. The latter may of been taking classes like radio communications in college. During my senior or junior year of HS, we filled out some kinda quiz/survey thing based on our interests to help us decide what we may like to major in if we went to college & the only two interests on the list that I had were watching TV & listening to music so no surprise the only two results I had for college interests were radio communications & film-school. I majorly s#ck with technical stuff & just want things to actually work well & know how to use what I want to use for my personal uses. I hear that other than tech stuff like special effects, film-school is mostly about script writing, directing, & acting which of corse I would have major problems with as well.



I think that was my problem in algebra 1. I'm horrible at memorizing formulas. I'm much better at basic real life math or math in video-games like comparing stats in old-school RPGs trying to decide which equipment or Pokemon are better. It can take me quite a while to figure the practical real life math out sometimes but at least I'm capable of getting there eventually. With algebra I could not catch on in the begging & you need to know the begging stuff in order to have any chance of figuring out the more advanced stuff. Since I just could never grasp the begging, I just got further & further behind. With some other subjects like the various Social Studies, you could miss out on learning for a period & then you move on to something different that is kinda unrelated to what you missed so you can learn the other stuff without ever learning what you missed out on but it is NOT like that for math. Math just keeps building upon itself.

Math of all sorts and math-heavy sciences (such as chemistry and physics) have always been my weakest subjects. My brain does not handle numbers or formulae well. Not officially diagnosed, but I have just about everything I usually see listed as part of dyscalculia. No skill with or interest in technology or anything, bad with directions, not good at visualizing and cannot manipulate images in my mind with any degree of accuracy (like trying to visualize a shape from a different angle). I’ve discovered recently that I’m actually pretty good at estimating if I am comparing one measurement directly to another, but get numbers involved and I’m hopeless (ask me to draw a three-inch line and I’ll probably be way off, but show me a three-inch line on one sheep of paper, then ask me to replicate it from memory on another, and I’ll probably be very close - but I won’t be able to accurately tell you how long it is). Don’t really have any particular strengths in any area, and my special interests are all pretty useless. Seems I got much of the bad and neutral parts of ASD and none of the good

I can definitively relate to this, on my first year of high school, Math where hell and I hated it so much.
the worst thing is that at the end, just trying to understand what was said was just making me angry and so I write an entire drama of 76 page called "The Saint Shovel's chronicle". it's the only thing I remember from this, beside how horrible it felt to have three hour long math test during the year.

Liking math is like being obsessed with trains. Its just a stereotype about aspies.

Many aspies suck at math. Just like many aspies hate trains.

I never got good grades in math at any level of school. Middling to bad grades. Though I seem to have retained some vestiges of mathematical reasoning that others lack. And I am good at doing arithmetic in my head.

... probably because of the way math has been taught these past couple of centuries, and all the more so within the past several decades, with decreasing emphasis on geometry. Math used to be highly visual. It has become more and more abstract and symbol-based.

Luckily these days there are more and more online resources for learning math, some of which are highly visual. See the separate thread Resources for learning math.

i don't hate trains and i don't hate maths per se, but i hate the crappy ways they half-heartedly tried to teach it to me not grokking that my brain doesn't work the way the typical maths-gifted person's brain works. where was Jamie Escalante when I was in school?

I never really thought of math as visual things. I'm NOT a very visual person. I was borne with a very rare low vision disorder & my brain can also have problems processing things that I can see well. Like if something new is put on a wall that is big & very noticeable to most people when they 1st look at the wall, I won't notice it for a while unless somebody points it out to me. I probably have that face blindness disorder that some of us on the spectrum have that I forget the name of. I also have major problems with abstract stuff. I guess now that I think about this, that could be major factors as to why I struggled so much with math.

Logically I tell myself I'm good at maths cause I get plenty of nines. Every time I do a UKMT paper I end up having a sleepless night of self-lecturing and sobbing into a pillow.
I tend to visualise algebra as 2-dimensional numbers floating & flipping around as I add/subtract/move them around. I'm pretty good at that but absolutely abysmal at Permutation & Combination. Anyone feel the same?

Yes... visualisation.
I suck at 2-D geometry involving complicated shaped because my brain keep interpreting them as 3D-shapes flicking around in different orientations. 3-D trig, which many of my classmates hopelessly failed at, was not quite as annoying because I could visualise the shape in my head almost like AutoCAD without flickering shapes. Algebra I visualised like flexible black chunks that float around an equality sign--so it wasn't too bad.

What can be visualised is ok. What can't is hell.

I rarely needed to use the calculus after I graduated uni.  Now I can barely remember the Chain Rule.

The only reason that I got good at math was that it became one of my special interests.

I doubt very much that being good at math is as common as people seem to think. It's just an easy stereotype based on our alleged lack of emotions and love of rules and logic.

It's not inherently and treating it as such can make working with more complicated equations tricky. Visualization limits you you 5 dimensions tops and only if you're cheating with it. Without the visualization, it's limited by the number of bits of information you can store in your working memory at a time.