
Ask HN: How can I learn and get better at maths on my own? - kindaenticing
Any good tips, books or online resources are greatly appreciated.
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nonamechicken
I am not sure how helpful this would be to you. I just started this course:
[https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-
learn](https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn)

This seems to be very popular and highly recommended in Reddit. She briefly
talks about how she was scared off of maths at one point in her life and later
went on to get a phd. She also has a book on the same topic. Note that the
course is not math specific.

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usgroup
I’d call what you want to do “teach yourself maths as a foreign language”. It
can very much be done because I did it.

If I could do it all again, I’d start with an old school Calculus course. E.g
“Calculus” by Binmore . It’s a decent and well explained introduction to
Calculus and Linear Algebra and it’s useful maths. You have to get a hang of
thinking in maths and doing maths you find boring.

From here it depends on what you want to do. There’s more maths out there than
there is time so you need goals.

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hackermailman
Go to expii.com and start doing a module to test where you're at. You do
exercises and if you don't get something, it shows you a 5min lesson. It's a
startup by the guy who coaches the US olympiad team. When you're done find
some introductory text that goes about proving things, such as Hoffman & Kunze
Linear Algebra or Concrete Math by Knuth et all. Concrete Math is accessible
to a motivated highschool student. You have Math stackexchange to ask
questions or hire a tutor from a local university to walk you through some of
the proofs at a coffee shop on a Sunday afternoon. I paid a grad student to
review my terrible attempts at proofs when I started going through the
exercises of these intro books, highly recommend you do this too.

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altairiumblue
Math is huge so how you approach this will depend a lot on your starting point
and your goal.

Which branch of math are you interested in?

Do you need it for something specific to your career or is it just a hobby?

What's you current level - are you comfortable with high-school level algebra,
trigonometry, calculus?

In any case, I second the recommendation for Khan Academy as a good starting
point - not only for the range of content and Sal's silky voice, but also for
their approach to learning: you get to practice topics until you "master" them
instead of just watching/reading, maybe taking a test and then moving on to
the next topic.

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bobfirestone
Khan Academy has everything from basic addition to multivariable calculus and
linear algebra. All free and online.

[https://www.khanacademy.org/](https://www.khanacademy.org/)

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afarrell
If you google “3blue1brown” you’ll get a youtube channel that has good visuals
for building your intuition before deeply learning about a topic.

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mindcrime
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=learn%20math&sort=byPopularity...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=learn%20math&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

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chmaynard
See previous discussion of this topic:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18939913](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18939913)

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BuenosAir
If I were you, I would better find a subject that interests me ( for example
AI or statistics ) and learn the math I need to understand to play with it

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phenomax
It heavily depends, whether you want to use math as a tool or focus on math
because math fascinates you.

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expopinions
A huge part of math is learning how things work, how to look at things, when
there’s actually an easier way to do things than that one formula you just
learned. Even if a book can perfectly teach you this, you still lose a lot of
perspective.

If you get a teacher, or at the very least someone who is helping you, or even
just learning alongside you, you’ll learn far more efficiently, as what the
other person thinks may be put in a phrasing, or use a tactic, or have some
reasoning, the list goes on, that you could never have come up with on your
own. Even if you’re smarter than Newton - well - Newton didn’t get to where he
got without a little help throughout his life.

HOWEVER.

That’s not to say it’s impossible. If you really have a love for mathematics,
there a loads of ways to learn more math. If you’re looking just to get some
random math knowledge, then roaming YouTube is actually a pretty effective
method of gaining some fun knowledge. Those guys are average joes just like
you and I. They always have something fun to get your hands on.

If, however, you’re looking for a specific subject, or something that would
otherwise replace a class, then get the best textbook you can find and get a
tutor. Maybe you’ll be fine on your own, but two heads are still better than
one, especially with education. Math builds on itself. If you just barely
scrape by in Algebra, Calculus isn’t going to be fun. You need to have a
pretty good understanding of everything. That’s why its so hard.

One last tip: pace yourself. If you think you’ve got a topic after reading it
and working on a couple of problems, still take a day on it. You’ll find
something you missed, find a shortcut, or something, and it’ll make the next
topic just that much easier. And again, that’ll carry on.

