Some years ago I got back into math basics, so I could do mental math as a hobby. I'm still doing it today, nearly daily. I've also added crosswords. I've found that this helps to keep me sharp (I'm in my 40s), and should help me even more as the years go by.
Relearning math as an adult
101–110 of 268 posts
Re: Relearning math as an adult
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
10th grade is the “on level” time to take geometry.
So US school kids don't encounter any geometry in school till they are ~16?
Shapes, areas of simple polygons and circles, Pythagorean theorem, volume of solids, graphing, translation, all that stuff and more that one might call “geometry”, is scattered between roughly ages 6 and 12.
I think the high school level “geometry” class—which may be the only one named such, but primary school math is full of geometry—is an atrophied organ left over from when it was still common to teach directly from Euclid, which is why it tends be about introducing proofs more than covering new abilities and techniques in geometry (though it may cover some of that, too)
Re: Relearning math as an adult
#103I may be biased as I am a trained Mathematician, but I always feel when someone says "Math is Hard", that is because they had bad teachers. Math is easy if you build up from fundamentals, not like physics education where you say "but lets delete everything before because it had an oversimplifying assumption", rather if you build your knowledge entirely sequentially from things you know or assume, you build up a toolb…
> I may be biased as I am a trained Mathematician, but I always feel when someone says "Math is Hard", that is because they had bad teachers. You're biased. I've had excellent teachers, math was - and still is - hard. Especially when you get into the more complex stuff. Not everybody is as gifted at math as you are.
Completely disagree. Problem with (at least) math is that you want a teacher is not super good at math, but still knows what they are teaching. When you get taught by a brilliant match wiz teacher they skip over the stuff that is obvious to them, but what is probably crucial for mere mortals.
I have had teachers who just blew over the simple stuff because they didnt care about it and focused on the interesting hard stuff, which felt a lot of people behind and also with actually good teachers who focused on the "easy stuff" to build a strong foundation before moving to the harder stuff.
Re: Relearning math as an adult
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I may be biased as I am a trained Mathematician, but I always feel when someone says "Math is Hard", that is because they had bad teachers. You're biased. I've had excellent teachers, math was - and still is - hard. Especially when you get into the more complex stuff. Not everybody is as gifted at math as you are.
Completely disagree. Problem with (at least) math is that you want a teacher is not super good at math, but still knows what they are teaching. When you get taught by a brilliant match wiz teacher they skip over the stuff that is obvious to them, but what is probably crucial for mere mortals. I have had teachers who just blew over the simple stuff because they didnt care about it and focused on the interesting hard s…
I wrote "I had excellent teachers", not that they were super good at math.
Re: Relearning math as an adult
#105If OP still wants to learn the mathematical foundation of transformers, I built a free alternative learning tool: https://afaik.io/nebula?mode=nebula&category=blueprint&id=ed... It's also based on an underlying knowledge graph, connecting concepts across various subjects like maths, machine learning, physics, etc. You can check the graph for transformer here: https://afaik.io/nebula?category=brickset&id=VLlOnZLl&mode…
I find the concept of "underlying knowledge graph" interesting. What does it mean? I assume it means such a graph connects the topics together as "pre-requisites". To understand A you need to already understand B and C, and to understand B you need to understand D and ... etc. But the thing about such a graph is that really it must be a tree, not just a directed graph. Why? Because there cannot be cycles in it. If to…
If to understand D you need to know both B and C, each of which requires familiarity with A, the graph is not a tree
Re: Relearning math as an adult
#10650 a month for what Khan academy does for free?
Ads do be getting smarter, albeit more annoying
Re: Relearning math as an adult
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Completely disagree. Problem with (at least) math is that you want a teacher is not super good at math, but still knows what they are teaching. When you get taught by a brilliant match wiz teacher they skip over the stuff that is obvious to them, but what is probably crucial for mere mortals. I have had teachers who just blew over the simple stuff because they didnt care about it and focused on the interesting hard s…
I wrote "I had excellent teachers", not that they were super good at math.
you also wrote other stuff.........
Re: Relearning math as an adult
#108This is basically an unsolicited ad post. It communicates nothing of substance and the entire thing amounts to "click the sign-up button". It doesn't even cover the course contents. How this makes it to the HN front page is mind-boggling. Goatse would at least be more entertaining.
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Re: Relearning math as an adult
#109[deleted]
Re: Relearning math as an adult
#110Can anyone help me with some questions about this program? (I assume the founders will see this thread once they notice the HN hug of death) 1. How exactly is AI being used here? Is there an AI chat-bot that I can ask for help? Do you generate problem-sets with AI? Check answers with AI? Is it GPT-4? 2. Do you utilize Spaced-Repetition in any way? Have you found that to be useful? Thank you
Hi there, my name is Justin Skycak, I'm the Director of Analytics & Algorithms at Math Academy, I developed all of our quantitative software, and I'd be happy to answer your questions. 1. The AI is more like an expert system that emulates the decisions of an expert tutor with regard to what tasks a student should work on at any given point in time (what should the student learn next, what do they need to review). The…
Very cool! Thanks for the reply.
It would be awesome if you could also add GPT-4 as a kind of helpful tutor. Not sure if you're already experimenting with that.
> Our spaced repetition model not only accounts for implicit "trickle-down" repetitions but also minimizes the number of reviews by choosing reviews whose implicit repetitions "knock out" other due reviews (like dominos), and calibrates the speed of the spaced repetition process to each individual student on each individual topic (student ability and topic difficulty are competing factors).
That's super interesting and definitely one of the issues I faced while building anki cards for math classes I took in undergrad. Thanks again!