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.
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?
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.
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.
> Math Academy's courses are fully accredited by the Accrediting Commission for Schools, Western Association of Schools and Colleges. www.acswasc.org
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).
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.
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.
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.
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."
They believe they can help people reach better outcomes for less. Whether they're correct or not is another question.
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.
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.
If this kind of pricing helps these services be sustainable over the long term, it's probably not a bad thing.
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.
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.
This one really helped. Somehow realizing that matrixes are just equations with two or more unknowns was somehow mindblowing.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 …
mna_•6h ago
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•5h ago
chrisweekly•2h ago
adamgordonbell•5h ago
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_•4h ago
mlyle•1h ago
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•5h ago
Notatheist•5h ago
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_•4h ago
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•4h ago
mlyle•1h ago
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.
viraptor•4h ago
chrisweekly•2h ago
mtts•4h ago
I think it’s very expensive, and the correct price should be €$25/ month at most, imho, but its spaced repetition system definitely provides value over self study.
mna_•4h ago
viraptor•4h ago
mtts•4h ago