symbolipoint said:
"Pretty good at physics" means "Pretty good at Mathematics", too.
Really? I doubt this considerably.
In high school, I was pretty good at physics but I was not so good at math exams. I had no problems understanding math textbooks by self-studying but seldom did well in math exams. I usually self-studied math in high school because I couldn't understand what the math teacher taught in his course. I just feel math questions require some strategies to work out. Though I could always understand the math textbooks and could do their exercise questions without problems, I couldn't always work out math questions in exams because they were usually very tricky and far trickier than those exercise questions in textbooks and thus it's often not easy for me to think of those required strategies in the given short test time. But physics is different. I just need to understand physics concepts (this is usually easy for me) then usually I could work out the physics questions because the employment of math technique in physics is straightforward (you don't need extra strategies beyond understanding that math technique).
In undergraduate school, I enjoyed those analytical subjects the most, like theoretical mechanics, thermodynamics, etc. In my department, all math courses were those math applied in physics, so I only needed to understand those techniques then applying them to physics is straightforward. Therefore I felt math in my department is easy. In graduate school, all courses I took are of analytical style and I enjoyed them very much, and my research subject is this way, too. All math courses arranged in my department were those math applied in physics, like group theory and symmetry, advanced math methods for physics, so they are not that hard. However, I suspect math taught in math department should be far harder because they must be quite tricky, as in my impression for math in high school, but I have never taken any course in math department so am not sure.
ShyWheatSeeds said:
I have heard physics majors are ridiculously hard
Based on my experience as described above, I think math is harder than physics because it requires much more strategies. Therefore people who are good at math should have no problem in physics.
