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How to Learn Advanced Mathematics Without Heading to University – Part 3

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Re: How to Learn Advanced Mathematics Without Heading to University – Part 3

#161

This is stupid. The hard part about a Math degree is the number of hours you have to put in. If you cannot go to university full time, go part time. If you cannot go part time, you don't have enough time to actually learn any of these topics on your own. I've done these classes. It's typically 150 hours per class and it's not something you do after coming exhausted home from work either. After those 150 hours you'll…

> If you cannot go to university full time, go part time. If you cannot go part time, you don't have enough time to actually learn any of these topics on your own.

Going to university part time eats up more time than reading a textbook at home or wherever you are in your spare time. It also locks you in to the specific pace that the class is at which is not optimal for most people, because people learn different things at different paces. There is also the cost of university to consider.

Re: How to Learn Advanced Mathematics Without Heading to University – Part 3

#162
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because you've had the access, doesn't mean others do... I don't think that the author of the post you're responding to is making any sort of normative claim. > Sometimes the issue isn't time - it's money and access to schooling I think the author is suggesting that if you have that kind of free time, then you either a) must be independently wealthy, or else that b) trading some of that free time for cash you…

I don't think it's a decent assumption for "almost everyone" in the west. I'd say it often is the case that you won't have enough free time for such studies unless you trade cash (income) for the free time. At which point you may not have much after paying the bills. Or you're unemployed and, well, don't have the cash. You suggest trading some of that free time for cash, as if unemployment were something people solve…

> You suggest trading some of that free time for cash, as if unemployment were something people solve by snapping their fingers and choosing to make a trade

Not at all; I meant in the form of a loan, where free time is time you would otherwise spend retired.

And I was also assuming that you already have a decent job that allows you to work 40 hours or so and make a comfortable enough living to consider spending your free time learning math.

Frankly, I can't possibly imagine trying to do something like learn advanced mathematics while also struggling with un- or under-employment. I grant that there are probably people far more motivated and resilient than I assume :-)

Re: How to Learn Advanced Mathematics Without Heading to University – Part 3

#163

This is stupid. The hard part about a Math degree is the number of hours you have to put in. If you cannot go to university full time, go part time. If you cannot go part time, you don't have enough time to actually learn any of these topics on your own. I've done these classes. It's typically 150 hours per class and it's not something you do after coming exhausted home from work either. After those 150 hours you'll…

This course of study seems to take just as much, if not more, time than a math ugrad+master's at a typical uni. The people who could really benefit from having a path of textbooks like this fall into two categories: those who don't have access a university (due to poverty, rural location, and/or being a shift worker, for example), and high school students. And I think the latter category is more important than people…

A friend of mine is in high school, and he's absolutely brilliant in math. I'll be sure to link him this.

Re: How to Learn Advanced Mathematics Without Heading to University – Part 3

#164
post #156
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of a shame that so many schools push you to study calculus in order to study CS; digital computers are algebraic machines, not analytical ones, pace Babbage. Combinatorics and graph theory would be far more useful. (Although maybe this will change with machine learning.)

Computers would be darn boring without calculus. Graphics, games, audio, animation - basically anything enabling creativity on a computer needs calculus tools. The interesting bits start to happen once one has built sufficient substrate out of the discrete parts. This is my personal opinion only, of course.

What those have in common is that they're numerical, not that they require (integral and differential) calculus.

It's true that in a lot of cases, deeply understanding discrete numerical algorithms is a lot easier if you can analyze the continuous versions, which of course cannot be executed directly. But you can get really far with just the discrete versions, and you can understand useful things about the continuous versions without knowing what a derivative or an integral is.

And I don't just mean that you can use Unity or Pure Data to wire together pre-existing algorithms and get interesting results, although that's true too. You don't even need to understand any calculus to write a ray-tracer from scratch like http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/aspmisc/my-very-first-raytra..., which is four pages of C.

You could maybe argue that it's using square roots, and calculating square roots efficiently requires using Newton's method or something more sophisticated. But Heron of Alexandria described "Newton's" method 2000 years ago, although he hadn't generalized it to finding zeroes of arbitrary analytic functions, perhaps because he didn't have concepts of zero or functions.

You could argue that it's using the pow() function, but it's using it to take the 64th power of a dot product in order to get specular reflections. People were taking integer powers of things quite a long time ago.

Even using computers for really analytic things, like finding zeroes of arbitrary analytic functions, can be done with just a minimal, even intuitive, notion of continuity.

Alan Kay's favorite demo of using computers to build human-comprehensible models of things is to take a video of a falling ball and then make a discrete-time model of the ball's position. A continuous-time model really does require calculus, and famously this is one of the things calculus was invented for; a discrete-time model requires the finite difference operator (and maybe its sort-of inverse, the prefix sum). Mathematics for the Million starts out with finite difference operators in its first chapter or two. You don't even need to know how to multiply and divide to compute finite differences, although a little algebra will get you a lot farther with them. A deep understanding of the umbral calculus may be inspirational and broadening in this context, and may even help you debug your programs, but you can get by without it.

I agree that calculus is really powerful in extending the abilities of computers to model things, but I think you're overstating how fundamental it is.

Re: How to Learn Advanced Mathematics Without Heading to University – Part 3

#165
post #98
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hope this doesn't come across as brash. I don't mean it to, but I must disagree with your assertions (In my case at least). Learning advanced mathematics without university is completely possible. Because it is at your own learning pace. Not one of a University. I graduated several years ago with a BS in Computer Science, with a Focus on Networking. And during that time, I held 3 part time jobs while also be…

* the most advanced math I had was Algebra 2* How could you get a BS in CS without taking calculus courses? Which school did you go to?

Unfortunately in my case it was a private, non-profit university which had accelerated degrees (5 semesters squeezed into each year) - I'm rather dissapointed at how it turned out for the price (almost 50k!) and I wish i would have just put that money towards an actual, recognized university instead.

Heck, even last year I talked to another University to look into electrical engineering and only 1, ONE, class would transfer. All others wouldnt count because since they were a private school, their curriculum was different than most. Thats not something they put in brochures.

Re: How to Learn Advanced Mathematics Without Heading to University – Part 3

#166
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hope this doesn't come across as brash. I don't mean it to, but I must disagree with your assertions (In my case at least). Learning advanced mathematics without university is completely possible. Because it is at your own learning pace. Not one of a University. I graduated several years ago with a BS in Computer Science, with a Focus on Networking. And during that time, I held 3 part time jobs while also be…

> A few years after Uni, I started teaching myself Calc, Trig, Vector maths, Diff Eq and Physics strictly from what I have found on various sites, software and books. Most unis I know of (I'm in the US) require those courses to be taken as part of your undergrad before you can attain the CS degree. Furthermore, with the prevalence of AP courses at the high school level, many students enter college already having take…

Yeah unfortunately mine was a private, non-profit university (US) and I think because of that private status, they can change curriculum to suit their needs. I wouldnt have went to them if I had known that. Whats confusing is that they are an actual University but can mess with curriculum that much. And for almost 50k in tuition..

Re: How to Learn Advanced Mathematics Without Heading to University – Part 3

#167
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, if you're just auditing the class, maybe. When I was in college they made me retake ridiculous prereqs for the most trivial of reasons every time I transferred, allowed no exceptions to these, and personal requests to professors to get out of them were completely ignored. The prereqs were enforced by the computerized registration system - good luck getting past them without a waiver. As one anecdote, they once to…

If you are taking a degree program, it is the institutions responsibility to ensure that you have met all the requirements. If they don't have enough information on equivalence of a different institutions course, the easiest thing for them is to require you retake the sequence. The way to get around this isn't by taking pretests (which don't mean much) it's by writing the final exams. In some institutions you will be…

That's kind of my point - they could have tested me easily by giving me some problems from a previous final, or anything else, or even talking to me for five minutes, but instead they chose the path of petty legalism by assuming since the syllabus didn't agree with their's 100%, the only way to guarantee I knew the material was to make to pay to retake the entire sequence.

I failed to mention I'd also already spent three years as a physics major and had already taken classical mechanics, electrodynamics, and quantum mechanics - so being told to retake the intro physics sequence was quite silly indeed.

Re: How to Learn Advanced Mathematics Without Heading to University – Part 3

#168
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually agree with you: basic calculus should not be studied in college. It belongs in high school, and should be a required prerequisite for college admission.

In high school, I was taught math horribly. I wish high school would stick with just the basics, and work on doing it better. I spent a year in a community college making up for what I should have learned in high school; basic math up to advanced algebra. Sure I applied myself more, but the teachers, and even the text books seemed better? Once I learned the basics, it made math enjoyable, and I didn't fear courses th…

I learned more advanced math in high school than I did in college (as a mech. eng. major). I wished that instead of sitting through basic calculus/lin. algebra courses again in college, they had challenged me with something more advanced.

Re: How to Learn Advanced Mathematics Without Heading to University – Part 3

#169
post #164
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computers would be darn boring without calculus. Graphics, games, audio, animation - basically anything enabling creativity on a computer needs calculus tools. The interesting bits start to happen once one has built sufficient substrate out of the discrete parts. This is my personal opinion only, of course.

What those have in common is that they're numerical, not that they require (integral and differential) calculus. It's true that in a lot of cases, deeply understanding discrete numerical algorithms is a lot easier if you can analyze the continuous versions, which of course cannot be executed directly. But you can get really far with just the discrete versions, and you can understand useful things about the continuous…

A sufficiently advanced understanding of the finite difference operator might well be considered indistinguishable from understanding "calculus"...

Re: How to Learn Advanced Mathematics Without Heading to University – Part 3

#170
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What those have in common is that they're numerical, not that they require (integral and differential) calculus. It's true that in a lot of cases, deeply understanding discrete numerical algorithms is a lot easier if you can analyze the continuous versions, which of course cannot be executed directly. But you can get really far with just the discrete versions, and you can understand useful things about the continuous…

A sufficiently advanced understanding of the finite difference operator might well be considered indistinguishable from understanding "calculus"...

I did mention that, as you can see :)
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