Even if you’re competent at arithmetic in school, those skills can definitely atrophy. I say this as someone who’s unreasonably slow at basic arithmetic despite being an ex-mathlete; I got complacent because I’ve been learning and using graduate level maths, so I thought that would keep me from getting rusty. Nope — it turns out that basic arithmetic that you’d use in daily life is a different “muscle” to the kind of maths you use in academic research (which is obvious in hindsight)
I can’t imagine how much I’d be struggling if I didn’t have a good foundation to be starting from
You aren’t alone. Historically before calculators were common, engineers and mathematicians would actually have books with basic arithmetic answers already done, or they would hire people (usually women) called ‘computers’ (no joke, that’s what the term was used for before computers as we know it were invented) to do the basic calculations for mathematicians so they can focus on the more complicated stuff.
So even a highly talented mathematician from the 1910s and 1920s would still struggle as you do.
Even if you’re competent at arithmetic in school, those skills can definitely atrophy. I say this as someone who’s unreasonably slow at basic arithmetic despite being an ex-mathlete; I got complacent because I’ve been learning and using graduate level maths, so I thought that would keep me from getting rusty. Nope — it turns out that basic arithmetic that you’d use in daily life is a different “muscle” to the kind of maths you use in academic research (which is obvious in hindsight)
I can’t imagine how much I’d be struggling if I didn’t have a good foundation to be starting from
You aren’t alone. Historically before calculators were common, engineers and mathematicians would actually have books with basic arithmetic answers already done, or they would hire people (usually women) called ‘computers’ (no joke, that’s what the term was used for before computers as we know it were invented) to do the basic calculations for mathematicians so they can focus on the more complicated stuff.
So even a highly talented mathematician from the 1910s and 1920s would still struggle as you do.
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