I'm in my early thirties and I feel I've not really made any significant effort in learning math/physics beyond the usual curriculum at school. I realize I didn't have the need for it and didn't have the right exposure (environment/friends) that would have inculcated in me these things. And perhaps I was lazy as well all these years to go that extra mile. I have (had) a fairly good grasp of calculus and trigonometry and did a fairly good job working on a number of problems in high school. But over the past 12-13 years, I've really not had any need to flex my math muscles other than a problem here or there at work. Otherwise it's the same old enterprise software development. I follow a bunch of folks on the internet and idolize them for their multifaceted personalities - be it math, programming/problem solving, physics, music etc. And these people had a natural flair for math/physics which was nurtured by their environment which made them participate in IOI/ACPC etc. in high school and undergrad which unfortunately I didn't get a taste of. I can totally see that these are the folks who have high IQs and they can easily learn a new domain in a few months if they were put in one. Instead of ruing missed opportunities, I want to take it under my stride in my thirties to learn math/physics so as to become better at it. I might not have made an effort till now, but I hopefully have another 40 years to flex my muscles. I believe I'm a little wiser than how I was a few years back, so I'm turning to the community for help. How do I get started? I'm looking to (re)learn the following - calculus, linear algebra, constraint solving, optimization problems, graph theory, discrete math and slowly gain knowledge and expertise to appreciate theoretical physics, astrophysics, string theory etc. |
I would recommend two outstanding textbooks. Halliday and Resnick, early editions , printed in the late 60s and 70s. If you can do all the odd problems in this two volume set, you are an educated person, regardless of your greater aspirations. Edward Purcell’s Berkeley Physics Series Second Volume on Electricity and Magnetism. Might be the best undergraduate physics textbook ever written. Did you know that magnetism arises from electrostatics and relativistic length contraction? It’s right there. You should also get yourself a copy of Feynman’s Lectures on Physics. Warning. Read it for intuition, motivation, the story of Mr. Bader, and entertainment. It’s at much too advanced a point of view to help you solve nuts and bolts physics exercises, which is what you must do. One final warning. Every one of us sits at a desk with a powerful internet-connected computer. Don’t do this. Even get a calculator to avoid this. Of course, when you are stumped you’ll want to see how a topic has been treated by others. Do it in another room.