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Relearning math as an adult

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Re: Relearning math as an adult

#131

Post by eps »

jacquesm wrote: post #44

Before you look into paid options for your tuition needs I'd look into the Khan Academy first. It's free, very high quality and it's more than just math if you want it. Sal Khan is one of the greats and the Khan Academy, together with WikiPedia is one of the best things to come out of the internet.

Khan Academy is good and free, but it is inferior to Math Academy in many aspects. It's more tedious, takes more time and, most importantly, it's not as streamlined, as guided and as fuss-free as the MA. The latter got the process and the UX absolutely nailed down. All the praises you read and hear are 100% deserved.

Re: Relearning math as an adult

#132

Post by mabedan »

eps wrote: post #124
mabedan wrote: post #118

I tried math academy for this exact purpose, but I had to give up because it didn't let me test out of lessons that I was already good at (Similar to how duolingo would allow you to do). So I ended up wasting a lot of time sitting through all the exercises which I didn't need.

You could've asked them to add this option. They are very responsive and reasonable.

I did. They replied a generic corporate answer that we do the best for our customers and they said I’m free to cancel my subscription

Re: Relearning math as an adult

#133

Post by eps »

jacquesm wrote: post #49
JustinSkycak wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why am I not surprised that a marketeer shows up in an 'organic' posting about a company.

Don't be nasty.

Especially ridiculing a tech person giving detailed and interesting answers as a "marketeer".

Re: Relearning math as an adult

#134

Post by sjducb »

mjburgess wrote: post #117

The "math" used in ML/AI papers is usually just a sort of 'whiteboard math' which is a domain-specific mishmash of linear algebra, calculus, set theory and statistics. If you could find a book just going through the relevant bits you wouldnt really have to "learn math again", it can be translated into english straightforwardly -- very very few ML papers relevant to industry have extended proofs, etc. that require eg.…

I think you don’t realise how much math you know. I’ve heard of set theory, but never studied it.

Re: Relearning math as an adult

#135

Post by baq »

boxfire wrote: post #3

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. 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…

IMHO when people say 'math is hard' they mean 'it takes more work than other subjects to be good at' - you're either a prodigy or you grind problems until you get the intuition. The easier subjects you can usually talk everyone and yourself into thinking you know them, or perhaps the ratio of memoization to practice is skewed more towards memoization. Maths is practice, practice, practice and then some more practice - blood, sweat and tears.

Re: Relearning math as an adult

#137

Post by bambataa »

juunpp wrote: post #27
UncleOxidant wrote: post #22

So... basically an ad for Math Academy? How about some free resources like Khan Academy?

That's basically what it is. There is nothing to learn from this post other than "smash that beta sign-up button". Has anyone tried that course? Is it any good?

I have been doing the Math for ML course and would recommend.

I have UK A level math but not Further Math, so up to basic calculus. But I forgot most of it and so Math Academy has me going through a lot of the Math Foundation units along the way.

I was initially put off by the monthly price, as it is quite steep. The clincher is that about a year before starting Math Academy I had gone through the Open University’s MST124/125 textbooks (covering the same stuff as Foundations). Except even after a year I’d already forgotten most of it.

Math Academy learning feels much more robust, since it includes spaced reviews and regular tests. I record things in Anki but it’s useful to have regular practice questions too. I also use ChatGPT to spell out things and find it works well at this level.

Some things I’d like Math Academy to have:

- ability to skip lessons (I don’t want to spend ages going over symbolic integration again)

- a reference page to track unlocked material, maybe with Anki integration

- fewer multiple choice questions and more in depth problems

- proof-based math. I’m told this is coming but the degree-level courses have missed their estimated due dates.

I will definitely finish Math for ML and then do linear algebra and multivariate calculus. You’d still need a good textbook to do them rigorously, but I think Math Academy sets you up well.

Re: Relearning math as an adult

#138

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

boxfire wrote: post #3

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. 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'll bite, I think this is mostly bias. Strong evidence against this is that the average IQ of a mathematics undergraduate is, like, 125 or so, compared to ~115 for the average college graduate - that is just way too sizeable a difference to be explained by chance.

Math really does seem just plain hard for a great many people. It seems to me from having done some math on the inside like it also would get harder with each point downward in IQ than at a faster rate than most other valuable things in life.

Re: Relearning math as an adult

#139

Post by tux3 »

baq wrote: post #128
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #119

About a year ago my wife and I made the joint decision to get her into college for a bachelor's degree in either English or computer science. Here in Finland, university admissions are based around how well you did on various end of school exams, and she fortunately did quite well on all of them a decade ago - except for math. She bombed math due to health and family problems as a teenager decimating her ability to p…

> set her nose to the grindstone Worth calling out the key observation: it takes practice, and lots of it (for most people, anyway) to get good at math. Just reading about it does zilch.

It does a little more than zilch. Exercise is important. Reading is also important.

If you want to learn fast, you need a balance of both that works for you. Some people will spend months grinding hard problems on their own in a single chapter to make sure they really understand. Some people will read too fast and have to go back because they don't have solid foundations, and only thought they understood.

Reading is about as important as doing exercises. You're not going to reinvent all of math on your own. You get insights from both.

Re: Relearning math as an adult

#140

Post by mjburgess »

sjducb wrote: post #134
mjburgess wrote: post #117

The "math" used in ML/AI papers is usually just a sort of 'whiteboard math' which is a domain-specific mishmash of linear algebra, calculus, set theory and statistics. If you could find a book just going through the relevant bits you wouldnt really have to "learn math again", it can be translated into english straightforwardly -- very very few ML papers relevant to industry have extended proofs, etc. that require eg.…

I think you don’t realise how much math you know. I’ve heard of set theory, but never studied it.

sure, but you dont need to understand actual set theory -- it's just notation for mostly obvious programming stuff,

R means float, Z means int

R^2 is actually notation from linear algebra, but here it means a point is 2 floats with a measure of distance between points etc.

A lot of this could just be given in a "crib sheet" for tech people, and you'd get 80% of it straightaway.

It's years of work to understand this notation as used by the professional domains it was invented by, but it's a couple weeks for most "good, technical, software engineers" -- since they arent really using notation in much more than superficial ways.

Of course there are hard mathematical papers, etc. but they're rare in ML/AI mainstream papers; and not something most would read.

If you need to be able to read, eg., some sort of adv. statistical time series research in economic modelling, you'd already have the background to do that. If all you want is to be able to read 90% of the popular papers, the notation in them is just syntax sugar for things you could state easily in english or python

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