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I suck at math, please divulge resources

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Re: I suck at math, please divulge resources

#31
Try a maths for engineers course at your local Uni. If you don't want to or can't enrol, you could probably just sneak in up the back and take notes, I've done this in the past for courses I was just curious about, lecturers usually don't mind. often they enjoy it - someone who actually wants to learn!

There may be something of interest here too, this is the link to Itunes U in ITunes,

http://deimos3.apple.com/indigo/main/main.xml

Re: I suck at math, please divulge resources

#32
Another point worth mentioning: Math in general is heavily interconnected. The more math you do, the better you become at it. A large amount of math is knowledge. That mess of symbols is something you will have to understand. As soon as you understand what it means, everything is just trivial.

My advice would be to start with some books you can understand and then build up there towards your goal. It may take a couple of years, but the time used are going to be paid back in masses when you hit other math problems: They suddenly got easier too!

Re: I suck at math, please divulge resources

#34
post #29
post #13

Shameless self-promotion, but I write about math in an intuitive way here: http://betterexplained.com I think the key is realizing that math is about manipulating a mental model of an idea. The wrong model can make certain tasks impossible -- for example, thinking that numbers must be 1-dimensional makes complex numbers a paradox. But when you see that they could represent items in 2 dimensions, you see how complex n…

This site is awesome. It helped me unscrew my understanding of complex numbers.

Thanks :). Complex numbers befuddled me for a long time too.

Re: I suck at math, please divulge resources

#35
post #25
post #13

Shameless self-promotion, but I write about math in an intuitive way here: http://betterexplained.com I think the key is realizing that math is about manipulating a mental model of an idea. The wrong model can make certain tasks impossible -- for example, thinking that numbers must be 1-dimensional makes complex numbers a paradox. But when you see that they could represent items in 2 dimensions, you see how complex n…

I have pointed many of my friends at your site; it's a wonderful resource. Thanks for taking the time to make betterexplained - the world is a better place with it existing.

Thanks for the kind words! It really means a lot knowing it's coming in useful.

Re: I suck at math, please divulge resources

#36
post #13

Shameless self-promotion, but I write about math in an intuitive way here: http://betterexplained.com I think the key is realizing that math is about manipulating a mental model of an idea. The wrong model can make certain tasks impossible -- for example, thinking that numbers must be 1-dimensional makes complex numbers a paradox. But when you see that they could represent items in 2 dimensions, you see how complex n…

I had never heard of this site before. All of these articles look really interesting! There goes my weekend.

Thanks -- ironically, I was planning on spending this weekend writing some more :)
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