11–20 of 57 posts
Check out http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ for some pretty good math resources (I've been really enjoying it).
Hah, awesome. .
The two topics I found most helpful to becoming a good computer scientist were O() notation and graph theory. Another idea, if you felt like covering it, would be the computery side of topics like linear algebra. I was forced to take linear in school and hated it, but I was getting linear for math people, not linear for CS people, so I didn't learn any of the graphics applications or neat things you can do with Markov chains and all that.
At the moment I have been shoring up my math skills with a College Algebra text book, the book "Mathematics for the Non Mathematician" (highly recommended - it is the book that has re-inspired me to learn more math), and a tutor that meets with me for one hour once a week.
The tutor is an excellent resource - even though I don't remember everything I learn from him because my time is short and I can't always practice problems outside of our session; I still pick up tid-bits here and there.
Having an online resource geared specifically for hackers would be absolutely awesome - to sort of compliment everything we do for ourselves already, having a resource built by a hacker for hackers is very exciting.
How to Solve It by George Pólya's 1945 http://www.amazon.com/How-Solve-Aspect-Mathematical-Method/d...
and
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering Learning to Learn by Richard W.Hamming http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9056995014/ref=olp_product_...
Great books, and they will introduce you to learn the mathematical thinking, so you can deduce the patterns yourself. Great for math and hack I think.
This would be absolutely awesome. I'm 14 and going into 9th grade. I'm taking algebra 2 / trig next year but I hate how they teach it so I use the internet to teach me. This would be a really cool idea, I'd definitely use it.
If you're interested in computer science, study topics in discrete mathematics, real algebra (the algebra where you compute with symbols instead of numbers, look into "rings", "groups", and "fields"), and some statistics. And if you have to scale back on something to make room, scale back on trigonometry.
Discrete is a subset of math that was barely touched on in my school, and it was a massive culture-shock to get to college and never have seen many of the staple discrete problems. Statistics is useful in real-time problem solving and analysis and is at the core of some of the neatest modern algorithms, including those in cryptography. Trig, on the other hand, is something that you will likely have pre-written libraries to support and is just not as important to most computer work. It's useful, but unless you're going into computer graphics and games it's maybe not as necessary.
These days, I can tell you the area of a triangle from its vertices but I still get thrown easily in a crypto discussion. If I had high school to do over, that's what I'd do differently.
Don't let the title fool you. It's really a guide to advanced applied mathematics.
I'd also suggest the material be supplimented with a good bit of statistics. In my experience, statistical reasoning (particularly as it applies to noise, perturbation, and system reliability) tends to be weakness with hackers.
People absorb concepts differently so you won't know beforehand the best way to present the material. This feature would allow say, another experienced math teacher, to create their version of the best journey through Mathematics.
You can then keep track of the most popular graphs (through voting or usage).
This feature would also help with your "but where then?" question. If a graph creator thinks "basic number theory" should go between fractions and algebra but, there's no article about "basic number theory" then just putting it into their graph will create a stub article.
Keeping track of stub articles would then let you know what topics are needed the most.
Can't wait to see what you come up with.
I think this might be a useful approach to carry over to your site. Once someone understands trees well, I think it allows them to understand graphs better when they learn that a tree is a just a type of graph.