[HN Gopher] 500 days of math
___________________________________________________________________
500 days of math
Author : gmays
Score : 146 points
Date : 2025-08-12 18:33 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (gmays.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gmays.com)
| mna_ wrote:
| You can do all of that without paying a monthly fee. You just
| need a library card (or know of a person called Anna and her
| archive ;) ) and a list of books. These are the ones I used:
|
| Precalculus by Axler
|
| Calculus (Ninth Edition) by Thomas
|
| Linear Algebra by Lay
|
| How To Prove It by Velleman
|
| Understanding Analysis by Abbott <--- I'm currently here
|
| Much, much, much cheaper than paying $50/month. What I've spent
| most on so far has been printer paper and fountain pen ink
| because I do exercises by hand instead of using a tablet/iPad but
| in total this expense has been waaaaay under $50.
| usrnm wrote:
| The #1 resource needed for self-learning is motivation, and for
| many people it's a lot more difficult to come by than money.
| What you're paying $50 a month is not information, but a system
| that encourages you to keep doing it
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Also, paying for something can increase your commitment to
| it.
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| My understanding is Math Academy is like combining anki with
| direct instruction.
|
| It's a business premised on teaching people things faster by
| understanding research around learning.
|
| If the math it teaches is the math you need or want to learn,
| its likely an efficient way to learn it.
|
| So, you are paying for efficiency. Like using Pimsleur rather
| than spending a year in France.
| mna_ wrote:
| You can do that manually. Say for example you learn
| integration by trig sub today and you do 30 problems from a
| book. Next week you do some more trig sub problems. Then 2-3
| weeks after that you do some trig sub problems and then in a
| few months you do some. You can do spaced rep manually. Is
| mathacademy more efficient? I don't know. It's too early to
| say. But what I do know is millions of people have learned
| mathematics with books, pen and paper for hundreds of years.
| mlyle wrote:
| > You can do that manually.
|
| Absolutely. You can spend time on figuring out what to do
| next, and how, and how to do spaced repetition for the
| material and test yourself effectively. There are aspects
| you'll do better than a set curriculum because you
| understand yourself, and there are mistakes you'll make
| because misunderstandings and errors.
|
| Or you can pay an expert to do that for you, and just use
| the time on learning.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| $50 a month is just not that much money, though. It's maybe a
| percentage point or two of the average US person's take home
| pay. And if this even doubles the speed at which I learn what I
| need to, then I'm saving myself many hundreds of dollars of the
| equivalent of my time.
| Notatheist wrote:
| I've recently gotten back into math and I'm really struggling
| with your approach. I find it particularly difficult to get an
| accurate view of how well I'm doing and where I am. Most
| concepts I ingest easily, and I demolish any exercises in the
| books I read, find on the internet, ask AI for, or scribble
| down myself randomly. I repeat them a couple of times to make
| sure. All is well. Cute green checkmarks abound. Categories
| marked as mastered. Pride bordering on arrogance. I move on. A
| week later I'm handed new concepts. The house of cards
| collapses. I haven't mastered any of the things. There are
| gaping holes in the information I was given and I wasn't
| knowledgeable enough to notice.
|
| The author doesn't seem to share my difficulties either. His
| are of motivation and those seem to maybe be addressed by the
| resource he used and specifically sharing his progress with
| other users. For $50 I expect more than polished KhanAcademy,
| promises like " _accelerates the learning process at 4X the
| speed of a traditional math class_ " (if anything I want to
| slow down), and a progress tracker to post pictures of on X. If
| I wanted to be told I'm amazing, how long my streak is, and to
| learn nothing I'd use duolingo.
| mna_ wrote:
| When do you do exercises, do you refer back to sections in
| the book or examples? If so, this is a bad habit. Try to do
| exercises without looking back. This will force you to use
| your memory. Also don't be too quick to check solutions for
| things you're stuck on.
|
| Everyone who does mathematics feels the way you do when
| learning something new. It's a normal feeling. Don't get
| disheartened. Push through it.
| noelwelsh wrote:
| What you describe is entirely normal in my experience
| learning lots of stuff and teaching many others. It might
| help you to let go of the idea that learning is a linear
| process where you master one topic and move on to the next.
| As I learn more I'm continually getting a deeper
| understanding of basic material I "mastered" decades ago. I
| often tell my students I don't think their understanding is
| complete but it is sufficient to move on, and the later
| material will help them get a better understanding. And it
| does!
| mlyle wrote:
| > that learning is a linear process where you master one
| topic and move on to the next.
|
| It's closer to true in mathematics than most other places,
| but _not very close to true_.
|
| It's amazing the "layer cake model" of mathematics learning
| is such a strong idea even among many mathematics teachers.
|
| On the other hand, sometimes a missing concept like
| cancellation in fractions or just poor proficiency in
| arithmetic rears its head and makes doing later stuff very
| hard. Once a student gets used to being and staying
| confused, it's often game over.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| > Once a student gets used to being and staying confused,
| it's often game over.
|
| I think this is a very good insight, that somehow eluded
| me. Many many people are OK being confused about things,
| and I never considered that it's something they learn,
| but it makes so much sense.
| viraptor wrote:
| Sounds like you'd really like MA. It will drill you on things
| until you actually know them. There's no green checkmark as
| such either - everything will be tested again spaced
| repetition style. You will be slowed down until you can
| actually use the previous concepts properly.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Mostly sympathetic here, but your duolingo comment is a bit
| too harsh. Anecdotal counterpoint: my high-schooler used
| duolingo last summer to skip a year of instruction and get
| into AP Spanish as a junior, and got into the Spanish
| National Honors Society, and earned a fluency certificate. (I
| know most high school language classes churn out students who
| can't speak a lick, but her school is excellent and she has
| working fluency - which she credits largely to using duolingo
| to catch up.) IOW, YMMV.
| mtts wrote:
| You can, but you will spend a lot of time figuring out what it
| is that you need to study and where your weak points are.
| MathAcademy does that for you so you can spend your precious
| studying time on, well, what you need to study.
|
| I think it's very expensive, and the correct price should be
| EUR$25/ month at most, imho, but its spaced repetition system
| definitely provides value over self study.
| mna_ wrote:
| You can discover your weaknesses yourself by doing problem
| sets then checking solutions. You'll notice what kinds of
| questions you keep getting wrong, then you make a note to
| study that area again or you do more problems in that area.
| You don't need a computer algorithm for this.
| viraptor wrote:
| You don't NEED anything really. But it's helpful to have a
| computer algorithm for this. Processing that yourself is
| meta effort not everyone has the extra time for or will be
| diligent enough about.
| mtts wrote:
| Right, and then you're expending mental energy on figuring
| out how to _teach_ math (to yourself) instead of on the
| math itself. This is not wrong, and will likely even teach
| you a thing or two (and in fact it was how self-teaching
| math worked before this came along) but, to me at least,
| MathAcademy seems to be more efficient in getting you to do
| just the math and nothing else.
| mpgwokreopw wrote:
| I understand such blog spam is yet another plug for another thing
| where you need to swipe your card at some point for some
| questionable benefit. At this rate I would have thought that we
| are able to smell the crap as consumers, but there seems to be
| enough people who are willing to experiment with that.
|
| For those who really want to "learn math" as autodidacts, nothing
| comes close to the Open University textbooks that are freely
| available in your libraries and also with some clever searching
| online. That material is refined over decades to support the
| autodidact use case.
| huhkerrf wrote:
| The post you're complaining about is someone's personal blog,
| which appears to go back at least a decade.
|
| Since you created an account just to complain about this, do
| you have a rule for what people can or can't blog about? Do you
| only accept posts about OSS and free materials?
| ewgterwerew wrote:
| I will surely be critical when a founder of a company is
| blogging about positive results of using his product on a
| $49/month questionable learning resource.
| huhkerrf wrote:
| You do know the blogger isn't the one who created the
| product, right...?
| ansel_d wrote:
| I'm interested in learning math, theoretical physics, electronic
| engineering, welding, and AI/ML.
|
| But, when you don't even focus on basic self-care, you sleep
| terribly, suffer depression, ADD, etc., you'll never get past
| just browsing someone's page of links to educational material to
| actually developing the habits you need to learn.
|
| If someone could solve that, I'd pay them $50/mo.
| komali2 wrote:
| For ADD I recommend "Delivered from Distraction" by Edward
| Hallowell, it has a lot of advice about finding ADD specific
| strategies for learning things and developing habits. I can't
| really think of a way to summarize, I strongly recommend just
| reading it.
| crinkly wrote:
| Oh another monthly subscription with no accredited learning.
|
| If you want to actually _learn_ mathematics, buy Open University
| book sets and work through them. MU123 - > MST124 -> MST125 ->
| M208 -> MST224. Diversion of M140 if you want stats. They are
| written by actual professionals, the course is accredited and if
| you like it you can turn that into an actual qualification as
| well. All the textbooks are in-house written over the space of
| over 40 years (!) and designed for self-learning.
|
| The whole set is on github somewhere as well if I remember -
| search for it.
| dugmartin wrote:
| It shows this 3/4 the way down on their homepage
| (https://mathacademy.com/):
|
| > Math Academy's courses are fully accredited by the
| Accrediting Commission for Schools, Western Association of
| Schools and Colleges. www.acswasc.org
| crinkly wrote:
| It matters _who_ as well as _that_.
|
| OU are accredited by Institute of Mathematics and its
| Applications, Institute of Physics and Royal Statistical
| Society for example (I am a member of two of these).
| mtts wrote:
| But if you self study using the OU books, you yourself will
| not be accredited.
| zelos wrote:
| You have to give them ~PS23k for that honour.
| crinkly wrote:
| Did that a number of years back. Was worth it.
| zelos wrote:
| Worth it in the personal sense, or career-wise? I'd love
| to do a maths degree, but being mid-40s with family,
| mortgage, career etc makes it hard to see myself doing it
| for real.
| crinkly wrote:
| I finished it when I was 47 and have a full time job, 3
| kids and a care responsibility for a sick parent.
| Planning is the word :)
| crinkly wrote:
| Correct but you know the material is good.
| jphoward wrote:
| $49 seems a surprisingly high amount for something aimed at
| students and learners - I appreciate the content may be good, but
| it's effectively 3 times a Netflix subscription.
|
| It's meant to be something you stick with in the "long term" by
| its nature, and yet an annual subscription is $500 - this is just
| completely unrealistic for any student. Someone in a lower end
| job hoping to "up skill" is going to really struggle with this.
| jpcompartir wrote:
| I believe their rationale is that a private tutor costs more
| than this _per lesson_ , and they're targeting the people who
| will pay for a tutor once/twice a week for themselves or their
| children.
|
| I tend to agree with you, it seems like they could be wayyy
| more competitive on price but I also understand where they're
| coming from.
| mtts wrote:
| They're not a private tutor, though. They don't explain very
| much and there certainly isn't a way to ask questions. As I
| said elsewhere, to me they're about twice as expensive as
| they should be.
| viraptor wrote:
| > They don't explain very much
|
| That's not really the case. Each separate step of each
| lesson is explained and practiced many times. Repeated
| failures across multiple students are noticed and
| explanations reworked. If it's not enough, you can report
| your issues. And there are MA communities to check with if
| you really get stuck for some random reason.
| mtts wrote:
| I'm currently doing the Calculus I course and while there
| are explanations interspersed throughout the problems,
| these mostly seem to be the bare minimum you need to work
| the problems. When I compare it to the calculus textbook
| I keep alongside it (Stewart's "Calculus Early
| Transcendentals") it barely seems enough.
| zelos wrote:
| The explanations are very limited compared to actual
| maths lessons, though: in my experience they were very
| often something like "it turns out that the formula for
| this is...".
| mlyle wrote:
| IMO it's scaffolded and explained a bit more than an
| average mathematics lesson, though teachers vary a lot.
|
| There's a whole lot of "here's the formula" and not so
| much "here's the derivation" in most classrooms.
|
| The math classes that I taught: I tried to do a lot more
| of the why, either rigorously or using proof by
| gesticulation. But there were still absolutely times that
| I just handed something over and was like "do _this_ ,
| for now."
| jpcompartir wrote:
| Yes, they are not a private tutor, and they do not claim to
| be. That is just the market they are going after.
|
| They believe they can help people reach better outcomes for
| less. Whether they're correct or not is another question.
| tptacek wrote:
| Private tutors are much more expensive and not uniformly
| effective. Math Academy is an extremely low-risk bet for
| parents of math students (you'll know before the first
| usage period whether it's working out). I like the business
| model here a lot --- I also just think it's like something
| concocted in a mad scientists lab to annoy HN people, who
| always have a really hard time intuiting market/pricing
| segmentation.
| serial_dev wrote:
| I get why some people would not want to pay this, but it's also
| not at all unreasonable to pay 50 USD.
|
| It might be 3x a Netflix subscription, but Netflix is, for
| many, just wasting our time, whereas learning math could mean
| you can get a better job (higher salary, more interesting
| projects, future proofing yourself), then suddenly the 50
| dollars per month is negligible.
|
| I also get that in the end all this is available for free
| scattered around the internet and libraries, but having
| guidance, having a system that helps you actually do the
| learning is also very valuable.
| viraptor wrote:
| There are cases where it's not the student who is paying.
| Definitely all the younger students, since that's covered by
| parents by default. I got it covered for a while under work's
| learning budget. I'm sure there are other groups I can't think
| of right now.
| dmpk2k wrote:
| Having once been poor I understand you, but this is missing the
| bigger picture. If you're going to improve at mathematics you
| need to put serious time into it.
|
| Instead of an hour of extra work every day, you're doing math
| instead. At minimum wage that's around two grand lost over a
| year. Even if MathAcademy was free.
|
| Also, I recall seeing MathAcademy being free if you can
| demonstrate financial need.
| AlanYx wrote:
| The latest trend in educational software seems to be relatively
| high pricing. See e.g., Mentava, which sells for $500 USD/mo
| (not a typo). AoPS online courses are $28/lesson (though Beast
| Academy can be had for $100/yr). By comparison, this ($49) is
| in the realm of reasonable.
|
| If this kind of pricing helps these services be sustainable
| over the long term, it's probably not a bad thing.
| SvenL wrote:
| If you need to get into math and are not really motivated I can
| recommend 3blue1Brown by Grant Sanderson
| (https://www.3blue1brown.com/). The best part is not only, that
| he explains math problems in an easy way, but also show how to
| approach math problems in general. I think it's one of the best
| sources to start with Math.
| mtts wrote:
| Not sure I'd want to use it as my only resource, but as
| supplementary material it's excellent. He really explains
| concepts well (some better than others though, though this is
| likely a ymmv issue).
| barrenko wrote:
| If you are recommending 3B1B from a pov of someone who has
| already once been past college level math, it's certainly
| commendable, but does not help someone who has not.
| komali2 wrote:
| I really want to backfill my math one day, so I've slowly
| collected tools like this for "when I have the time" (scheduled
| in 2 years lol). I'm unclear why I'd use this tool instead of
| Khan Academy, which is free and seems to have developed a solid
| reputation for the like, decade or more its been around.
| lemonberry wrote:
| I'm surprised Kahn Academy hasn't been mentioned. It's free and
| from my experience pretty good. Though I'm not a parent or
| teacher so I can't speak from either of those viewpoints.
| mtts wrote:
| Khan Academy last I checked went up to High School. MathAcademy
| goes up to undergrad math.
| darkstorm2150 wrote:
| High enough for you ?
|
| https://www.khanacademy.org/math/calculus-2
| DataDaoDe wrote:
| I used math academy for several months. I was curious and wanted
| to try it out since it's a problem I've also worked on in the
| past. Th system is good, the fractional spaced repetition is a
| nice system and really reduces the spaced repetition overhead.
| Still IMHO, it provides nowhere near the value of the $50 a month
| pricing. But again I also know a lot of higher level mathematics
| and can work my way through a topology book on my own, so I'm
| probably not in the target audience. Still, I would think that
| even for people wanting to get into math or high school students
| this would still be a very steep price.
| mtts wrote:
| FWIW my experiences with MathAcademy roughly overlap OP's: it's
| really hard work and adult life seriously interferes with making
| speedy progress (notice their own success stories are with
| teenagers who can devote hours upon hours on racing through the -
| very good - curriculum).
|
| They say 1 point is equivalent to 1 minute of work and that you
| should earn at least 45 points a day. Well, for me 1 point is
| nowhere near 1 minute of work: I'm sloppy and sometimes downright
| stupid so it's 1,5 minutes at best and often much, much more.
|
| Banging your head against a wall every day for more than an hour
| (sometimes much more) just to get to what they consider to be the
| minimum of 45 points is no fun, and probably even
| counterproductive. I managed to keep it up for four months and
| made reasonable progress during that time (on getting back to
| where I was at the end of High School, 30 years ago) but it also
| burnt me out. I've now scaled it back to 30 _minutes_ (not
| points!) a day. As a result my progress is now glacial.
|
| Also, they're very much of the "just do lots of problems and
| you'll learn mathematic concepts and principles by osmosis"
| school of math instruction. For me I had to buy a textbook to get
| some extra explanation.
|
| The good thing is that the problems seem well thought out and the
| spaced repetition system definitely works (for me, anyway).
|
| I'm going to keep it up, because I have enough disposable income
| to afford it (though it _is_ much too expensive for what it is)
| and I really want to bring my math skills up to a level where I
| can follow along the math in ML papers (and also because math, it
| turns out, is kind of elegant and interesting). I _could_ go the
| self-study route, but then I'd have to spend time and effort
| guiding myself and figuring out what it is I needed to work on.
| If nothing else, MathAcademy is good at taking care of this for
| you so you can focus on the math itself.
| milvld wrote:
| Any pointers on useful textbooks in this space? I seem to have
| difficulties finding one that is at the right level (not too
| easy, not too hard) or that provides a way to gauge your level
| and start accordingly at a later chapter or whatever.
| mtts wrote:
| Depends on what you need, I suppose. This resource is said to
| be pretty good: https://www.susanrigetti.com/math
|
| I decided start with Calculus I on MathAcademy because that
| was the last thing I did in High School. MathAcademy
| disagreed and told me to do PreCalculus and even bits of
| Algebra II first, but I knew better (MathAcademy was right
| and in hindsight I should've just started the Foundation
| courses to build up my pretty weak algebra skills again).
|
| For Calculus I simply use the textbook that's recommended at
| the link above. As far as I can tell, it's good. I don't do
| the problems, though - for that I use MathAcademy.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Not a textbook, but https://betterexplained.com is an awesome
| resource for gaining intuition, its author's approach is very
| unlike others I've encountered.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| Just checking out a few of these will change your concept
| of what it means to understand something in math and cause
| you to seek out better explanations beyond the textbook
| one. You can also refresh yourself on a topic in a way
| that's fun.
| cassepipe wrote:
| https://betterexplained.com/articles/linear-algebra-guide/
|
| This one really helped. Somehow realizing that matrixes are
| just equations with two or more unknowns was somehow
| mindblowing.
| stephen_cagle wrote:
| Yeah, I only have a goal of 25 points a day, Monday through
| Saturday, and I still usually take more than half an hour
| (though usually less than an hour) per day.
|
| I actually feel that 25 points may be a bad choice as it makes
| me spend too much energy picking lessons that will barely add
| up to 25 so I can be done with my daily. Probably causes me to
| review or whatever when maybe I don't need to?
| criddell wrote:
| I've never understood why people post daily updates to social
| media. Who wants to see that?
| zelos wrote:
| I recently stopped my MathAcademy subscription: I went from
| halfway through Math Foundations II through to near the end of
| Linear Algebra. I stopped because I realised I wasn't really
| learning maths, I was just learning to answer the questions by
| rote.
|
| The way that they pretty much completely omit all the
| explanation, proofs and discussion you get in traditional maths
| education really limits its utility once you get to more advanced
| content. I think the reason for a lot of the positive reviews is
| that their approach works really well early on when you're
| revising the basic end-of high-school stuff.
| tejohnso wrote:
| I'm also on foundations 3 at this point and love the system. I
| combine it with Anki to reinforce the retention of older
| material, and I find the price very reasonable for something that
| helps me learn math consistently.
|
| As for the price, I see people mentioning text books as a cheaper
| alternative, but Math Academy includes review work, tests, and
| retakes when necessary. It takes care of the organizing and
| evaluating that is related to but not the same as the learning.
| You can focus on being a student, without having to also be the
| teacher.
|
| I would love a full depth, accredited system that didn't cost
| thousands of dollars.
| jona777than wrote:
| > It was at the same time depressing (I'm dumb), liberating (I
| don't have to pretend I'm not dumb anymore) and exciting (I have
| a chance to be not dumb anymore).
|
| > Learning is hard work, and if you don't respect the process, it
| won't happen.
|
| These two ideas resonate well with me. My experience in pursuit
| of steady and sustainable growth in any area of interest has had
| these in common. You have articulated them well enough for me to
| realize that. I appreciate that.
|
| I am also at a similar point in life that sits at the
| intersection of building consistent habits that support goals and
| balancing priorities like family life. "It's a marathon, not a
| sprint" has never been more applicable.
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm at 10k points after a couple months. Previous experience was
| self-teaching linear algebra, which I needed for cryptography
| work, and I managed well enough to help my daughter cruise
| through a proofs-heavy linear algebra course at UIUC; I'd have
| aced it if I took it. I started doing MathAcademy for two
| reasons: to replace an NYT crossword habit with something more
| rewarding, and because I have (had) no calculus. I do about 250
| points per week.
|
| Math Academy is --- _so far_ --- probably one of the better
| dollars-for-skills trades I 've made in my adult life, easily
| outstripping every book I've ever bought.
|
| I have a lot of gripes!
|
| * The gamification is really annoying as an adult learner. There
| are lots of little cues in the system to keep moving forward,
| which pushes me past what feels like the limits of retention.
| There is no credential Math Academy can give me that I give a
| shit about, so moving faster for the sake of it is a bad trade
| for me.
|
| * Along similar lines, I really wish it was easier to get more
| explicit review. Part of the premise of Math Academy is that the
| spaced repetition comes in large part from units that build on
| each other; you're making relentless forward progress with
| reviews baked into new material. I've at times had to have
| o4-mini make me problem sets, which seems dumb since I'm paying
| for exactly that from Math Academy.
|
| * "Foundations", the adult learning series, is premised as being
| a curriculum stripped of stuff high school students learn solely
| because they'll be tested on it. They could strip it more. I got
| that sense in Foundations II but wasn't confident enough to call
| it out; now I'm doing linear algebra stuff and, I mean --- I
| object on moral grounds to inverting a matrix with determinants!
|
| The flip side though: I have a decent grip on calc now, after
| just a couple months of doing this rather than crosswords. My
| trig, another weak spot, is _annoyingly_ better (also I now know
| I authentically hate trig). The gripes are just gripes; my
| overall experience is, it does what it says on the tin.
|
| I read people (and reviews, including expert reviews) complain
| about Math Academy's spartan approach to
| explanation/exposition/proofs. It's a super fair concern. For my
| part, I pair Math Academy with GPT; GPT is better than any online
| math education resource at _explaining_ and _handholding_. I don
| 't need explanations; what I need is a focused, structured
| curriculum: do this, then this, here's the problem sets, here's a
| graded quiz. I know how to read a book already; books didn't
| teach me any math --- university linear algebra course homework
| problem sets did. This is a better version of that.
| mettamage wrote:
| Yea I also combine it with ChatGPT and Claude. It helps for
| extra context and at a high school level, I can still do the
| checking myself. Sometimes it's simply that I have 0 clue about
| what keywords to even search for. ChatGPT helps with the
| discoverability of that.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| > I object on moral grounds to inverting a matrix with
| determinants!
|
| The determinant of a linear map is the induced effect it has on
| volumes. So it makes sense that it appears when inverting a
| map: if the forward map scales volumes by detA the the inverse
| needs to scale them by 1/detA. It also makes sense as an
| invertibility criterion: you can invert a map iff it didn't
| collapse the space down to a lower dimension iff it doesn't
| reduce volumes to 0.
|
| Of course this is presented completely opaquely at a low level
| with the even more opaque cofactor matrix stuff. So the trouble
| is that we really need to incorporate wedge products and some
| of the underlying geometry better at the lower level.
| tptacek wrote:
| That first paragraph is more valuable than a unit of
| determinant matrix inversion problems.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| I generally agree, though I think that's kind of a
| rejection of approaches like MA entirely (with the caveat
| that I've never used MA, so I'm assuming what it is based
| on discussions I've read): mathematics naturally gives you
| spaced repetition from new concepts building upon previous
| concepts, so calculation problems are mostly needed as a
| "check whether you are truly following along", and doing an
| entire unit of _any_ type of calculation is somewhat
| pointless once you reach a certain maturity level unless
| there 's some specific insight you're supposed to get from
| each example calculation.
| tptacek wrote:
| I see exactly what you're saying and I agree: the kind of
| understanding your exposition gives is different than the
| kind of upskilling Math Academy can promise. My only
| thing here is (a) there's value in both approaches and
| (b) everything I've read about self-teaching math is that
| you can't get fluency without grinding problem sets.
|
| I buy that you need both (and: I supplement MA with
| ChatGPT, which is pretty great at Socratically working
| through concepts), but also I cringe whenever people say
| "oh, you want to understand eigenvectors, just watch the
| 3blue1brown videos", because, those videos are great, and
| watching them in isolation gets you approximately 0%
| closer to being able to do (or appreciate) a PCA.
|
| I think a set of videos like Strang's 18.06 and Math
| Academy (but for arbitrary subjects, like Calc II or
| undergrad Stat) would be a pretty killer combination. Are
| a killer combination, is what I mean to say. But I've
| only been at it a few months!
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I did a summer of khan academy over a decade ago.
|
| I was switching from liberal arts to NLP and wanted to train my
| math muscle. I went with their "world of Math" which was a
| feature to go over all math problems "in order". When stuck you
| could view the associated video.
|
| I don't think they have that feature anymore.
|
| As khan Academy goes from preschool through high school, you
| start out by counting pictures of elephants and other exercises
| meant for young children to get comfortable with numbers, which
| was definitely too early a place to start.
|
| I thought it was fun to see how such exercises looked and I
| didn't really now how far I wanted to skip so I just powered
| through.
|
| I think it was really good with the above caveat. My other two
| cents are: going from way too easy problems to problems you
| actually have to work on is jarring in terms of pacing. All in
| all I enjoyed it.
|
| It's love to know how it compares to MathAcademy. I think Khan
| Academy is of really high quality and to go from free to
| $50/month requires a lot of added value.
| khalic wrote:
| Reminder for the broke people like me, Khan Academy is free and
| very good
| Dropoutjeep wrote:
| I forget where I originally saw this, but someone put together a
| document titled "How to Take all the Math Classes You Need."
| (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1G-hSdO5Tm9Nc6E4GobZZlwD0...)
|
| While it assumes a level of competence of basic algebra, it
| essentially mimics a self-study math major and provides links to
| lecture recordings, widely used textbooks, problem sets, and
| answer banks to said problem sets. You obviously have to be self-
| motivated, but it beats paying $50 per month for the service OP's
| post links to.
| mlyle wrote:
| > but it beats paying $50 per month for the service OP's post
| links to.
|
| I used this with my kids.
|
| The $50 a month to make it easy is worth it for many people,
| and is downright cheap compared to many approaches.
|
| Now, there's other options-- Khan is also great and free. But
| always having a bite-sized chunk to do, immediate feedback,
| spaced repetition, etc-- it's pretty good.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| This could've been written by me, it so closely matches my own
| experience. I know too well the "hit with a bag of bricks"
| realization that much of your professional life has been more or
| less you winging it. Math has that tendency of shining a bright
| ugly light on your real capability. It's deeply humbling.
|
| I've been using MathAcademy, trying to do at least one lesson
| each night after the kid is asleep. But instead of rote
| memorization, I sit with each problem until I truly and deeply
| understand it.
|
| It's going to be a long time before I'm mathematically competent,
| but there's nowhere to go but up.
| mtts wrote:
| Yeah, that's my thinking now as well. It's going to take an
| incredibly long time but truly understanding each problem is
| probably the only way to go.
|
| Which is where this beats self study using books, I think. With
| a book, I can sort of wing it and think I understand something
| when I only do so very superficially whereas when you do the
| problems you truly learn what you understand and what you do
| not. And MathAcademy is _only_ problems, so ...
| UltraSane wrote:
| I'm doing Math academy and learning Mathematica at the same time.
| I've made the pragmatic decision to do as much with mathematica
| as possible. This makes learning math vastly more fun and faster.
|
| Claude is pretty good at explaining how to solve problems with
| and without using Mathematica.
| wjrb wrote:
| I have tried Math Academy after seeing a post here a few years
| ago (I think it was to Justin's blog? --- he's referred to early
| on in TFA).
|
| Echoing what others say: it was very cool, went quickly at first,
| but within a few weeks, progress slowed because I just couldn't
| ingest the new information as quickly, even when doing two
| "blocks" a day.
|
| It is superior to the free tier of Khan Academy.
|
| I don't know if it's superior to textbooks and problem sets in a
| self-study capacity.
|
| I found it better than the (highly rated) math education I
| partially received in HS.
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| That's a great find, as I'm in a somewhat similar place -
| (re)-learning maths at a not so young age, with kids, and doing
| it for the same reasons as the author. There is plenty of
| material out there for free (including a lot of complete courses
| from top universities), but not a lot of that is structured and I
| was often finding myself 'not knowing what I don't know'.
| Surprisingly, I've found chatGPT quite good for helping in that.
|
| My current method is watching a lot of videos and taking notes -
| it's great in the beginning when it's mostly rediscovering what I
| already knew, but anything that's really new - it takes orders of
| magnitude more time. And that's very hard without some structure
| in learning.
|
| I'm definitely giving Math Academy a try - looks great for what I
| need.
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