Is Math “Hard”?

A math major talks about fear – YouTube

A commenter objected to the statement that “math is hard” and I had to respond as follows.

Some math is hard is and some is not. Memorizing 3+4=7 is not hard, but *proving* 1+1=2 took 162 pages of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica in 1910, and the Fermat-Wiles theorem took 350 years from conjecture to proof (and defeated some of the greatest names in mathematics in the interim). Perhaps what she should have said is that *interesting* math is hard, but that’s so obviously what she meant that the qualifier is unnecessary. Indeed *nothing* that’s not hard is worth putting any effort into. (Breathing, at first sight, is not hard and it is only by seeking to perfect it and so “making it hard” that yoga teachers give its attention any value.)

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