Counting it all up

Two discussions occurred in my house this weekend. Both of them involving mathematics. Bill came in with his laptop. He was taking a break from the heat outside and while wandering the internet decided to look up current research on ill-conditioned polynomials. When he was an undergraduate, he'd devised a computer program that was successful in conditioning them. Since he never published his paper, he has been watching for years to see if somebody else figures it out. So far no.
As husband's sometimes do, instead of going public with his methods and his findings, he chooses to explain them to me.
I'm not sure I really understand what a polynomial is. I can't imagine why one would want to be ill-conditioned or what might cause it to be so unstable nearing zero. (I guess cold weather makes all of us go a little nuts!)
But I'm a very good listener and I don't mind looking at little colorful grafts and charts. When Bill talks about this kind of thing, it's like a glimpse into an entirely different world. As strange to me as anything a fantasy writer could conjure up.
The second discussion was instigated by me. I was filling out forms for Leila. Some of these forms require that I use symbols like > and <>?
What makes sense to me is that the pointy side is littler than the fat side, so the pointy side should point to the number that's less. But somehow it can't just point to the lower number it has to relate to some other number, some number that might not even be on the form. So less than 50 has to be written <50>50. Huh?
I get so frustrated with this kind of stuff. I just don't get it. Even as a kid, and I was a fairly bright kid, I couldn't get this sort of concept. You know when they'd give us a row of three baseball caps facing different directions and the question would be "Which of these are the same?" Well, they were pretty much all the same. For me the two that were the same were the ones that were facing each other, because they were both facing each other. The answer that the teacher wanted was the two that were facing right or two that were facing left. Facing each other didn't count.
I've read things over the years that women don't pursue math because they are not encouraged to do so. That society expects women to be bad in math. That may be true. But I am absolutely stuck in a stereotype. And I don't like it.
When I come upon a math problem, the first thing I do is take a deep breath. I remind myself that I am a smart person, that math is logical and therefore I can logically reason it out. That if I just break it down into smaller parts and work those out, then I will be able to come up with the answer for the whole. Utilizing this process consistently, I find that 9 times out of 10, I still get it wrong. What's a writer to do?
Readers often ask me about my process and how I get complicated stories down on paper. I have to answer, that I really don't know. There are no rules in writing. There are no formulas, no tables of known quantifiers, no algebraics. It's just one word after another and somehow it all comes out. I wish I understood it all better, but somehow just doing, without knowing, has gotten me a long way. Maybe it could be stated like this.
X = 1 disciplined writer x 400 manuscript pages + (characters >=people you actually know) - all the stories you've ever read + a lot of hard work from editors, agents, publishers and a bunch of other folks I don't even know about.
Do you think those other people I don't know could be polynomials? Conditioning is all the rage.