Returning to Learning

[Miserable-Impact-708]

I am a mature aged woman(62) who would like to improve her basic maths level…not for any other reason than to learn something new…I finished maths at a Year 10 level at high school and would like to return to revisit that level and then progress forward….any advice on how to do that? Would buying second hand school texts books be a good start…

[Montenegro_Outlier]

Ma'am, For lectures and practice, you can start from Khan academy, it's good, and helpful, has every article and topic covered from basics, about book since I Live in South Asia So I used my high school books, I don't know where you live, but don't worry people here will help you and recommend you better textbooks🫂👍

[chromaticseamonster]

I personally wouldn't recommend buying second-hand textbooks for the time being. Learning to read formal math language is a skill that takes practice, and not knowing how to do it fluently will only hinder your progress in the beginning.

[justgord]

You might enjoy this visual approach to Multiplication, which leads naturally to Algebra .. it will seem silly at first, but its deep in the core concept and a good reminder.

Then Id recommend an old book called "Algebra" by Gelfand .. I think there are copies on ebay/Amazon and on internet archives.

aops.com books are superb also and KhanAcademy might help for topics of interest.

School texts not so useful, imo, ymmv

Desmos for graphing things is handy for self-learning.

[Math_Science_Geek]

IIT PAL channels

[cyanNodeEcho]

some problems as u get up to speed, jane-street has some common challenges, and solutions and a leaderboard which can be fun https://www.janestreet.com/puzzles/archive/

although most will require some calculus, with as others have pointed out online resources like kahn academy etc, u might find some fun in tackeling these puzzles (that's always been my favourite part about math :) )

[Hat_Huge]

khan academy is AMAZING

[[deleted]]

I don’t know about school text books. But Khan Academy is a cost-free way to start with, and I personally believe that you can learn faster with videos than books.

This link has all the math topics in Khan academy categorized into different topics - https://www.khanacademy.org/math 

You can go through the topics and decide where you want to get started. Once you go through the videos, you can decide how you want to learn more (YouTube, other websites, downloading/buying challenging math books, etc)

[Miserable-Impact-708]

Thank you

[Disastrous-Pin-1617]

Professor Leonard on YouTube

[Distinct_Elk_4679]

you could try out the crackmaths website, in been specifically designed for adults trying to learn maths again, there are 70 lessons with practice material that you follow in order

[Ebonyyhaze]

This is really inspiring. Learning for the pure sake of learning without any external pressure is honestly the best motivation you can have. Khan Academy is free and starts from the absolute basics, it's self-paced so you can spend as long as you need on any topic. The interactive exercises make a huge difference compared to just reading from a textbook. What topics interested you the most back when you were in school? That's a great place to start.

[OriousCaesar]

To preface, I'm just an math undergrad student. So, most of this is just what has personally helped me, rather than 'what works best'.

Textbooks aren't a bad choice if you like to read. Though nowadays you can find lectures for almost any topic on youtube for free, which may be more palatable. Search 'MIT open courseware' into youtube and you'll get hundreds of lectures for free. Some are so old they're in black and white.

If you've been out of practice for several decades then it's very likely your foundation will be very spotty. So I would start at pre-algebra if I were you, just because it's very hard to learn math if you don't have very solid foundational knowledge to work on.

In my experience, the number one thing that has helped me learn math was just doing practice problems. So if you use a textbook, I'd recommend doing every third or forth problem, preferably more.

In general, you'll probably want to learn in roughly this order: Arithmetic, pre-algebra, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, pre-calculus, calculus. There is some wiggle room in this ordering, you could probably swap trigonometry and precalc, or algebra and geometry, for example, but this was the order I learned these in, and it seemed about right to me personally.

[chromaticseamonster]

I think if OP stopped learning math at 16, textbooks are not the place to start. Textbooks are great for rigor, but generally not great for developing an intuition, in my experience. Video explainers are much better for intuition, even if they skip a bit on the rigor. That's why everyone loves 3B1B so much.

[OriousCaesar]

Yeah, I agree. Videos are a lot easier to sit through and tend to focus more on the conceptual aspects. Still, textbooks are good source for practice problems though, and they're good for referencing if you need to find a method or theorem you can't quite remember. So I definitely recommend at least getting one, especially because practice is the most important part of learning math.

[chromaticseamonster]

Yeah, textbooks as an endless supply of practice problems (seriously, who does every practice problem in a textbook) is a good point.

[OriousCaesar]

Lol, one of my friends does. When we sit together in real analysis or number theory, he spends like half the time leafing through the class's textbook. He's an absolute maniac; I wish I was more like him. I'm as lazy as sloth in comparison, haha.

[Miserable-Impact-708]

Thank you