Sometime, while at university, I opted to stop studying math. Stupid idea, I know, but I did a lot of stupid things then (and probably still do). Now I keep running into walls where a topic I am trying to learn about breaks out math far beyond the calc 2 I progressed through. I need to remedy my crap knowledge in this field, but am not sure the best way to do it.
So, anyone with good suggestions please send them my way! I can read and learn from scholarly articles, enjoy text books, and am happy to ramble about total crap ad nauseum (I have a blog, don't I)? I am worried that the correct answer is "bike over to Stanford a couple times a week" as I don't think I can commit that much structured time at the moment (if they could schedule classes where you show up three times a week for a few hours a pop, but when those times work for you within a given week, that would be a different story).
My goal is a useful working knowledge, not just a rough understanding of concepts. I want to be able to actually think, not just read about things and feel 747's full of knowledge whizzing over my head.
Help?
writebacks...
Check out MIT's Open Courseware. Some of the courses are available in full video and they're great. Here's one on Linear Algebra: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/18-06Spring-2005/CourseHome/index.htm Stanford is also moving in this direction, using iTunes. Haven't checked their catalog out yet, but here's the URL: http://itunes.stanford.edu/ Surprisingly enough, Wikipedia is also an excellent resource if you have an idea of where to start. The articles tend to be fairly accurate and yet accessible to normal people, even when they're describing arcane topics.
I was going to suggest just that. I browsed a couple of the Open Courseware material back when it came out (linear algebra and quantum mechanics) and I was thoroughly impressed. Highly recommended.
If you're looking for practical math for software, Numerical Recipes in C is a good place to start. It's nice because they have both the code necessary to do stuff, as well as a terse explanation of the math. Sometimes the explanation is impossible to understand, but it often gets you the right terms for Googling purposes. MathWorld is also a great reference tool for math theory questions.
Ugh. Math.
I know what you feel. The way math is normally taught could turn Euclid away from it. The best solution is to find a survey course textbook written for non-math majors. I have taken a fair amount of math (Calc I-IV, Lin. Alg., Prob., Stats.) and found that one never got the joy. A survey course, on the other hand, provides the immediate practical uses of graph theory, matrices, state machines, and more. Math is linear until about trig., and then it linear because people are use to teaching it that way.
I've also taken some of MIT's Open Courseware and found it to be quite good as well.
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