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Ask HN: How to learn math from zero for adults?

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Re: Ask HN: How to learn math from zero for adults?

#51
post #29
post #28

I was a C student in high school. I never took a math class beyond basic algebra. I started from Khan Academy's first exercise when I was 33 years old. It seems silly looking back that I was solving problems on the number line as an adult. At that time, around 10 years ago, Khan Academy had excellent coverage through trigonometry and single variable calculus. Once I reached that point I went to my local community col…

Above is not advice but I would echo it, with emphasis that higher education makes much more sense when you go there as an adult with other stuff to do outside of it so uou just focus on learning things.

The counterpoint is that that maturity is much more valuable to industry, which is why they don't incentivize us to return to school.

Some balance needs to be found.

Re: Ask HN: How to learn math from zero for adults?

#52
Get a copy of the Open University (UK distance learning uni, been around since the 70s) books on EBay.

A full set of books for MU123 (The most basic maths course, basically school [age 16] level books) can be had for under £50 on Ebay. Work through them, then move on to the MST124 books which are college [age 18] level), and are also widely available on EBay. Those begin to cover cover calculus, vectors, etc...

I'm 1/3 of the way through doing a maths degree with them, having scraped a C at school almost 20 years ago.

Re: Ask HN: How to learn math from zero for adults?

#54
post #10

You don't say how much you already know. Your first stop would be Khan Academy and knowing your gaps. Fill your gaps. Learn HS level Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Statistics. You will need more Calculus and Linear Algebra later. But not now. Then try studying "Machine Learning for Absolute Beginners" book. It not very mathy. Then just keep going through ML courses. Learn what you need on the way. The "way" of math ne…

Although both are rooted in statistics, Data Science or Data Mining and ML are very different fields even if they might share some concepts and methods.

I did different courses for each in University. Data Science is concerned with extracting patterns from existing data.

Like you have some papers for exam and you want to know if students cheated. Or you have the results from a poll about people hobbies, income etc and you want to correlate that with voting for party X. Or you want to correlate the race of canines with their abilities.

ML is also mostly about patterns but in a different way. You want something to tell how likely a comment is spam, if an article is positive towards a politician, if a picture is of a cat or dog.

So, to get to get a fundamental understanding you will need to learn statistics. Which in turn will require some calculus and algebra, but nothing too difficult.

Although I have the basic math knowledge and I have the basic knowledge of ML and Data Mining, I quit trying to do things in those fields because they are really vast, especially ML. Knowing the math and the basics of ML is required but far, far from enough to get good results. The people who work in the field are focused on it. I like ML but I like software architecture and development more, so I did my choice.

That being said, I still got some benefits from basic ML knowledge when I used ML libraries such as ML.NET in my day job. Knowing what a SVM or random forest is and how to tune parameters to improve my model was helpful. It was just a simple usage case like suggesting to customers what they might want to acquire based on their past purchases.

Re: Ask HN: How to learn math from zero for adults?

#55
i too want to learn math, but being more advanced i m looking at specific fields like number theory or differential geometry. I just need some math to advance in physics… i came to the conclusion while self learning that a tool like a “google translate” for math or a hypertexted math would be of great use to find the right curriculum… pitched it to a foundation / but will def try to push it at one point of my life… Math education could go a lot faster than it does now

Re: Ask HN: How to learn math from zero for adults?

#56
post #28

I was a C student in high school. I never took a math class beyond basic algebra. I started from Khan Academy's first exercise when I was 33 years old. It seems silly looking back that I was solving problems on the number line as an adult. At that time, around 10 years ago, Khan Academy had excellent coverage through trigonometry and single variable calculus. Once I reached that point I went to my local community col…

I was an A+ student up to Sophomore year in HS. I downgraded to A or B+ student after I knew how much fun actual learning is.

Before that, all I was doing was memorizing and practising heuristics to get A+.

I actually started learning Science since 11th grade. I grew and grew. And my scores tanked.

Got only 6.xx/10 in college as well.

But no regrets. Learning Math properly gave me a super solid foundation to learn Deep Learning very quickly. Now I do my semi-dream job as a Deep Learning Research Engineer building actual products with Deep Learning.

I have a truly realistic chance of getting my dream job within the end of this calendar year.

No regrets. Screw scores and learning systems designed for the mediocres. The education system has no care for the poor learners with no parental care. Neither it is good for future scientists and geniuses.

Re: Ask HN: How to learn math from zero for adults?

#58
You may find this resource useful. It was written by Susan Rigetti (née Fowler) [1]:

So You Want to Study Mathematics…

https://www.susanrigetti.com/math

She also wrote:

So You Want to Learn Physics…

https://www.susanrigetti.com/physics

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Fowler

Re: Ask HN: How to learn math from zero for adults?

#59
This recent Ask HN covered similar ground:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31488608

Older discussions I shared on that one:

* Susan Rigetti’s “So You Want to Study Mathematics…”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30591177

* Terry Tao’s “Masterclass on mathematical thinking”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30107687

* Alan U. Kennington’s “How to learn mathematics: The asterisk method”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28953781

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