It’s Not About the Type of Motivation, It’s About the Total Amount of Motivation

Appreciation of mathematical beauty gets held up on too high a pedestal as the "correct" source of motivation in math learning.

Want to get notified about new posts? Join the mailing list and follow on X/Twitter.

While I enjoy the beauty in mathematics, I also think it gets held up on too high a pedestal as the “correct” source of motivation in math learning.

Personally, what I always found slightly MORE motivating was the prospect of engaging in enough intellectual combat training to open a can of whoop-ass on any sort of mathy problem that came my way while carrying out interesting applied projects.

And for other students, it’s more about math opening the door to projects in a specific field they’re captivated by like ML/AI, robotics, aerospace engineering, etc.

I don’t think there’s really a “correct” or “incorrect” motivation. It’s less about the type of motivation and more about the total amount of motivation – more is better.

That said, the “beauty in math” category probably lends itself better to large amounts of motivation because the relevance is immediate. When you’re learning math in service of a more distant goal, the motivation will get diluted if you don’t see how the math is going to be relevant (and even if you see the relevance, it would probably also get diluted the further away the goal is).

And of course there’s no limit to how long you can continue extracting math from the “beauty in math” category as you travel up levels of math, since you don’t have a particular end goal in mind like (“learn enough math to do XYZ”).

So if you look at a sample of extremely mathy people then you’re probably going to see the “beauty of math” category being the biggest source of motivation, even if motivation from that category isn’t any better than motivation from another category.

Want to get notified about new posts? Join the mailing list and follow on X/Twitter.