Learning Math

I am in my early thirties and honestly, I cant claim to have a good background in math.

But, I now have a burning desire to learn it from the ground-up.

What are the 'canonical' sources for math, both online and offline? I am lost as to where I should start. I want to have a fundamental, intuitive understanding of it.

To clarify, I would not consider it shameful to start at whatever level necessary (even the lowest, if required).

I'm in my late twenties, and even though I did comm systems as a EE undergrad (lots of math), I still don't feel like I really have a deep understanding on probability/stochastic processes, differential equations, and complex analysis.

www.betterexplained.com has some good tidbits for math.

I've found MIT's opencourseware to be a pretty good help: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/courses/index.htm#Math...

Only the undergraduate courses tend to have video lectures though. The ones on linear algebra and diff eq are quite good. When I first learned matricies in high school, the teachers just went through the mechanics of how to manipulate them and how to calculate a determinant. It wasn't until years later, and when I started wtching these lectures that it crystallized for me what it actually meant.

These are monthly lectures on math topics, which have been enlightening. http://www.ams.org/featurecolumn/index.html

If you like exploring, there's this: http://www.jimloy.com/math/math.htm

some free online texts http://www.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html

If you haven't had a course before, you can just follow the usual sequence of courses that high school students and college students take. calculus, multi-var calc, diff-eq, linear algebra, probabilty. And get a textbook and work through the problems. If you code, discrete math will probably help somewhere along the way. Probability/stat for machine learning.

If you've already had the stuff before, It might help just to pick one small topic in a math field, like gradients in multi-var calc, and just focus on that for a bit, and inevitably, it'll mention some other math tool that you don't know about, and just follow your nose and interests.

What I didn't learn until after I finished undergrad is that if you want to really understand conceptually what things mean in math, and not just how to manipulate symbols, there's no getting around working on problems paper (or matlab/mathematica) and just playing with it.

Hope that helps.

First of all, kudos on the turnaround. I think the most important thing to keep in mind is except for a few scattered geniuses, no one is inherently good at math. I know it sounds like a tired metaphor, but math really is a different language (which takes a lot of study and practice to achieve fluency).

If you lack fundamentals, skip the sources and look for the people. Find a good teacher and take their class. This will probably entail an intense week of course shopping at a local school. Friendly fellow students can be a huge boon, at least for me, since I solidify concepts best in conversations with peers.

If you, for some reason, absolutely cannot take a class in person, I would encourage you to find a study partner and watch online lectures together. I really like MIT's Linear Algebra and Differential Equations videos (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/av/index.htm#Mathemati...), but but I don't know if those are at your level.

Thanks!

I highly recommend starting with Theory of Poker by David Sklansky for basic prob/stats knowledge. It makes a good primer since it's all real-world applications and I know of multiple universities and corporations that use it as such.