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

I'm 25 and I studied a computer science BSc. After I graduated I worked as a data scientist for 2 years and now I'm a machine learning engineer at a small start up. I have also been feeling held back from the more senior roles by my lack of mathematics and toyed with the idea of MSc or PhD. I applied to Imperial and UCL Machine Learning MSc on 3 seperate occasions and was rejected from all because of the lack of Maths. In the end it would have cost £16k (course fees for 1 yr) + £26k (loss of earnings for the year after tax) and so I haven't applied since because, although studying those masters programmes would give me a gread mathematical foundation, I can also 100% self-study and save £££.

The habit of studying is the most important habit you can learn at this early stage. If you haven't read it, I strongly advise you read Atomic Habits. It's really helped me. Here are some great mathematics for machine learning courses, some I have taken and some I am currently studying.

Study tips: - Always show up even if you only study for 5 minutes, it's more important to show up than to be perfect - Make studying a daily habit even if you only do it for a short amount of time - Stack studying onto the end of another daily habit, e.g. study after you've eaten breakfast before you start work (this is what I do) - Make studying satisfying (I bought a small calendar and cross of each day I succeeded with a sharpie and it's super satisyfing crossing them off) - Remove distractions by putting your phone on charge in another room - Make notes on new concepts in the form of questions, these can be used later on flash cards to help refresh the material and avoid the effects of the forgetting curve - Write code to see the math in action. Running code is immediately gratifying and makes the value of the maths real and tangible.

- https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning (free, approachable) - https://www.udemy.com/course/machine-learning-data-science-f... (like £10 on sale, very approachable) - https://www.udemy.com/course/mathematics-statistics-of-machi... (like £10 on sale) - https://www.coursera.org/specializations/deep-learning - https://mml-book.github.io/book/mml-book.pdf [textbook, not very approachable until you have some background] (free)

I'm 42 and just getting started in ML and "the math" myself. I never got beyond algebra in High School but I have made a successful career in programming. I'm taking it day by day, I dedicate an hour each morning to plugging away. It'll happen eventually...

I'd recommend starting from Terence Tao's Analysis I book. It really starts you from "zero" (literally), and constructing natural numbers, all the way to real numbers and integrals, and beyond.

> Edit: My discovery of Halliday, Resnick, Walker physics textbook and Feynman lectures also was helpful. It was mostly- the Internet.

thank you for the tips! much appreciated