

Ask HN: Learn math faster w/ computers - blintson

I've learned a fair bit of python, c, and elisp. I don't know as much math as I'd like to. It's been my experience learning math in school that a lot of the time is occupied by paper and pencil. To avoid wasting time writing stuff out I'd like to use a computer to learn math.
 So here's my question:
1. Is it feasible; am I likely to learn faster by using a computer to try and explore the problem domains without having to use a pencil?  
2. If it'll work, how should I go about it? Latex, mathematica, any textbooks oriented towards working with math w/o pencil &#38; paper, anybody who's learned math in the way I suggest?
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mbrubeck
Project Euler is a fun way to motivate yourself to learn some algorithms,
number theory, and a few other math topics, by solving programming puzzles:
<http://projecteuler.net/>

O'Reilly's _Statistics in a Nutshell_ is a good stats textbook and reference,
has some good exercises to be done in R (or S or Matlab), and is generally
more programming-oriented than most statistics treatments.
<http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510497/>

Two important classics are Knuth's _The Art of Computer Programming_ (more
algorithms/programming-focused; very steep learning curve) and _Concrete
Mathematics_ (with Ron Graham and Oren Patashnik; more math-focused; may be
easier for self-study). Both have exercises you can work through, though many
of the exercises are proofs (not easily translatable to programming).

