Math is hard

Now, have someone throw a ball at you outside in the wind. Do you have any problems catching it? For most people the answer would be no. True, we may not be given precise information, and we may not be able to say how long the ball will stay in the air, when it reaches it's maximum height, or how fast it's going -- but we can catch it. We can quickly calculate the path it will take and react in order to catch the ball. It may not be the kind of math we normally think of, but it is math nonetheless. Math that functions so quickly and elegantly that we can instantly recieve the pertinent information.

Some math is easy for everyone. The areas of specialty simply differ.

I'd have to disagree with Andukar's statement "it is math nonetheless". Mathematics and physics describe the world, but they aren't actually the world.

Take as an example an equation describing the y-component of projectile motion in two dimensions:

v_y = v₀ sin θ + a_yt

The equations describe the events of the universe; they do not specify the events.

"Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics; I can assure you that mine are still greater." --Albert Einstein

I agree with Anark that the math that your mind computes via instinct is not the same as regular differential calculus. Fortunately, this means that your brain is simple enough to be saved from the horrible details. And good thing too, because as one forms more and more complex logic systems, things start to fall apart, and eventually everyone is forced to admit some built-in short comings in math. Even more insidiously, these short comings can be proved within such complex systems, by the very axioms of such systems! Thanks to a brilliant mathematician named Kurt Gödel, and Proposition VI in "On the Formally Undecidable Propositions in Principia Mathematica and Related Systems I" (1931), we can now state that there will always be parts of General Mathematics no-one will ever correctly understand. Kind of sad really. Oh well, off I go to rationalize out some unprovable true statements.

Mattel released a Teen Talk Barbie which could say over 200 different sentences.  Among these were "Math is hard!" and "Let's go shopping!"  Activist groups throughout the country were outraged that Mattel would program Barbie with such overtly sexist sayings, and the doll became the butt of countless jokes in the media and on the late night talk show circuit.

Tall tales of a "Barbie Liberation Organization" quickly spread, spinning stories of groups that would go into department stores and switch the speech chips in the Teen Talk Barbie and Talking Duke G.I. Joe dolls--consumers were allegedly shocked to find Barbie screaming "VENGEANCE IS MINE!" and Dukes who pondered, "Let's plan our dream wedding!"

Mattel quickly pulled the dolls from the shelves and reprogrammed Barbie without the offensive sayings, but the damage had already been done--many more people than ever before began to see that Barbie might just be everything that its opponents had been claiming for many years--materialistic, impossibly proportioned, and subservient.