Feeling down about your status in math class?  Your pessimism just needs some editing!  Ben Orlin over at Math with Bad Drawings has a new post about just that topic.  Go check it out!

The thing of it is, he makes some really good points with this post.  A lot of the things we learn in high school took mathematicians centuries to come to terms with.  The concept of a complex or imaginary number, i = sqrt(-1), wasn’t really accepted until the 18th century (why do you think they’re called “imaginary numbers,” after all?).  So don’t dispair if it takes you a little while to understand something in math class.  Mathematicians of old died before they could come to terms with it!