Options for Adults with Renewed Interest in Math? 633
Internet Ninja asks: "After only doing mathematics in high school level and in my first year of University, I've suddenly developed an interest in mathematics. Since that was now almost 10 years ago I'm a little rusty. Anything past pythagoras is a little tough for me :) but I know I could get back up to speed quickly. I could probably steal my daughters math textbooks and start reading but I'm wondering if there is a better way. I considered a part-time University paper at US$495 each and you need to do two as bridging courses in order to even start on undergraduate courses. A bit pricey when you have a home and family to look after as well. Another option was a night courses but I'm kept pretty busy with work. Does anyone have any advice or good resources?"
Go buy a book (Score:1, Informative)
2 words (Score:4, Informative)
www.math.com (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Mathematics (Score:2, Informative)
Just read some books (Score:3, Informative)
-BlueLines
Look at university web sites (Score:2, Informative)
For free... (Score:5, Informative)
This isn't completely what you want, but it is a very good reference site for mathematics, from the fine people who brought us Mathematica. And it's free, and as we all know, free is good.
math (Score:1, Informative)
Re:2 words (Score:5, Informative)
Math Competition Problems (Score:4, Informative)
Dover books (Score:2, Informative)
Community Colleges (Score:3, Informative)
As an undergraduate I had a minor in mathematics. I've been out of school for a few years and was interested in taking the GRE. In order to prepare for the quantitative section of the GRE I enrolled in a 5 week summer evening math course at my local community college. The course was titled "college algebra", it was basically stuff you should already know coming out of high school. However, it was wonderful. A perfect refresher for somebody who hasn't writen a proof or solved a quadratic since college. I enjoyed the experience so much that I'm enrolling in more classes this fall. I have found that community colleges are wonderful resources, but more importantly tuition is dirt cheap. $67.00 a credit hour here. I can't stress this enough, tuition doesn't get any cheaper than that anywhere in the US.
Try video (Score:2, Informative)
Here's a link to their Science & Math courses: http://www.teachco.com/ttcstore/CoursesBySubject.
Small private colleges are WAY better (Score:5, Informative)
Community college professors are usually masters (or less) degree instructors, perhaps working part time teaching while also doing other jobs. They have far fewer rigorous evaluations of their teaching, and they do absolutely no real mathematics research, so they don't really know what mathematics is actually important and what isn't.
Professors at big universities also have Ph.Ds and do research, of course, but they are paid primarily to conduct research and teach graduate students; undergrads are the lowest priority for them.
Book Recommendation! (Score:3, Informative)
Barron's
0812019432
Apologies if you're beyond this, but it is EXCELLENT if you're thinking of going to a
college level algebra class. Takes a few weeks
to work through. You'll be ready for intermediate
algebra or precalc when done.
Re:2 words (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Where are you going with it? (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, "a lot" is two words. I conflate them to one quite often, since I think of it as a single word. I'm not the only one. It'll probably eventually appear in the OED. I'm a language pragmatist, not a proscriptivist.
Re:Go buy a book (Score:3, Informative)
It provides a very intelligent of the whole topic of Mathematics, from the point of view of an adult reader wanting to learn more. The author goes into a lot of the interesting historical and cultural background behind the math.
It's truly a book that belongs in everyone's library.
Re:I dont know where you are (Score:5, Informative)
A *huge* part of which is "better" depends entirely on the instructor. I've seen fantastic University professors, and fantastic college Instructors.
One thing is for sure though: College will be cheaper, and University will have more depth. I'm sorry to all the flaming college advocates, but in general you simply will not find hard-core mathematicians working at a community college.
If you want basic multivariable calculus, maybe a little bit of algebra.. yes, college is they way to go. If you are serious about a deep study of mathematics... you simply cannot beat training with people who are ACTUALLY ACTIVELY DOING IT. University professors, as part of their jobs, are required to engage in active research in their field of study. The same is not generally true of college instructors.
I'm *not* putting down colleges by ANY stretch of the imagination. I'm just saying that colleges tend to focus more on "pratical mathematics" (e.g. "here is the math you need to be an engineering tech"...) whereas a University math department will focus on "theoretical mathematics" (I feel silly typing that.. but you get the point). It really just comes down to what you're interested in learning, and what you want to do with that knowledge.
In any case, good luck to you and welcome to the wonderful world of mathematics!
Advice from a math professor (Score:4, Informative)
I am a math professor at a liberal arts university and we have a "non-traditional" student (he hates it when I call him that) who went back to school for reasons like the one you mention. However, he has is doing it full time; he was a fairly successful consultant/businessman and took early retirement. Sounds like you don't have that option.
If you have a fairly week background in mathematics, you are going to need to "go to school". By this I do not mean that you have to register for a class. I mean that you need to be around people who are learning mathematics and talk with them - a lot. Students will typically tell you that they learn most of their mathematics not from the classroom setting, but talking with other students. Especially at the early levels, learning mathematics is very similar to learning a foreign language; to really learn it you must surround yourself with people who speak the language.
Our non-traditional student has learned this lesson well. For all intents and purposes, he lives in the math lounge across from the department. He even does non-math homework there just so he can be around when someone comes in to study math. He also gets the bonus the faculty come in and talk to him when they need a break. We don't always talk about the material he his studying; sometimes we talk about something that was in the news or something we are working on. But whatever we talk about increases his math vocabulary and exposes him to the important concepts in mathematics.
If all you do is night classes, you will not get this, even if you go to some of the best teaching schools in the country. And you certainly won't get this from reading books. So what is there to do? Many good liberal arts universities have math clubs that are intended to "popularize mathematics" and draw in new majors to the department.
A lot of times, these clubs pull in speakers to talk about jobs in mathematics. However, these clubs also farm for Putnam contestants (the big undergraduate mathematics competition) and hence sometimes work on problems. Putnam problems can often be understood with very little mathematics (though their solution is far from simple).
So, if you have a liberal arts university in your area, you might want to check if they have a math club (And whether it actually does math, or is just a social club). These typically meet in the evening and would give yourself an opportunity to surround yourself with other people learning math. This is not a substitute for learning math, however. You will still need to start either reading or taking night courses in order to learn the basic "grammar".
Three Sites to Start With (Score:3, Informative)
Mathematical Atlas [niu.edu]
Statistics Every Writer Should Know [robertniles.com]
a reason to consider colege courses (Score:2, Informative)
1) Algebra
2) Trigonometry
3) Calculus
4) Differential Equations
5) Linear Algebra
6) Prob/Stat
7) Abstract Algebra
8) Numerical Methods/Analysis
Then send your applications for grad school off. If you pass those seven classes you will be a shoe in.
Get Mathematica...or something similar (Score:4, Informative)
For the more adventuresome, I'd try J from JSoftware [jsoftware.com]. It's terser, and more intellectually challenging, but it's free and also has advantages over Mathematica in some respects. Ken Iverson has some on-line papers that make a good companion (one of which comes with the J distribution).
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Check out the Standard Deviants (Score:2, Informative)
It's basically high school curricula, at several levels, but they have a way of making some pretty dry material memorable. I was really surprised at what I retained after watching a few of their shows on physics and math. (They teach all kinds of subject matter.)
The girls are frequently cute too.
Teaching Company calculus videos are excellent (Score:2, Informative)
Change and Motion: Calculus Made Clear [teach12.com]. Prof. Starbird is an exceptional instructor who illustrates insights into calculus using layman's terms. I took three calculus related courses during the course of high school and college, yet found these six tapes to be incredibly enlightening.
Be sure to buy them when they're on sale! They're $54.95 today (2 Jul 02) but retail for as high as $199.95, I believe.
Enjoy,
Helevius
Re:Re-learning (Score:4, Informative)
Let x(n)=1 followed by n 6's.
Let y(n)=n 6's followed by a 4.
Theorem: x(n)/y(n)=1/4
Proof: It's true for the n=0 case.
The rest of the proof is by induction (what the original poster was thinking, but didn't really communicate well...)
To prove this, we need to show that if x(n)/y(n)=1/4, then x(n+1)/y(n+1)=1/4.
Note that x(n+1)=10*x(n)+6 (adding 6 to the end of the numerator). Further note that y(n+1)=10*y+24 (adding 6 to the beginning of the numerator. Then, x(n+1)/y(n+1) = (10*x(n)+6) / (10*y(n)+24).
Since x(n)/y(n)=1/4, y(n)=4*x(n), so this is equal to (10*x(n)+6) / (10*4*x(n)+24)
This is (10*x(n)+6) / (4*(10*x(n)+6)) = 1/4.
The poster had the right idea, contrary to some of the responses, but didn't write a very rigorous proof.
Re:2 words (Score:1, Informative)
Many of the pre-calc or calc classes at the university I went to where taught by inexperienced grad students, in which many had an extreme amount of trouble with the english language.
Re:For free... (Score:2, Informative)
Mathworld is good for quick-reference definitions and theorem statements, but it's tough to learn from it.
If you're going to plug math content sites on Slashdot, though, you might as well plug PlanetMath [planetmath.org], which in addition to being freely accessible, has all of its content published under the GNU Free Documentation License [gnu.org].
Re:Just read some books (Score:3, Informative)
It proved to be so useful even after I've entered and graduated from university, and beyond.
The Mechanical Universe -- Goodstein (Score:3, Informative)
-S
Re:Where are you going with it? (Score:4, Informative)
They republish paperback versions of classics (Newton, Einstein, Fermi, etc...), as well as titles such as Problem Solving Through Recreational Mathematics , and 100 Great Problems of Elementary Mathematics. The beauty of Dover is their price. Many books are under $10.
Also recommended for self study are the Schaum's Outlines [mcgraw-hill.com] series from McGraw-Hill.
Re:I had problems (Score:3, Informative)
Mathematics, at least pure mathematics, is more of a mindset that a knowledge set. It is incredibly hard to learn the mathematical way of thinking from books alone, that said once this mindset is acquired the books are the only thing you'll need.
My advice would be to find yourself a mentor who's willing to assist you in acquiring this mindset, you'll probably be succesful asking around the various maths newsgroups.
You need to be able to interact in real time with this person occasionally, but there is no reason not to do this over IM or IRC.
As for what to learn / which books to read Calculus by Micheal Spivak is an excellent book, it brings in rigour gently and covers all of the main points of analysis. Covering its contents alone would set you up for a college / uni course, though you might also what to get a basic grip of [say] group theory and a very basic idea of sets [doesn't have to be above the venn diagram level]
One word of warning do not let a physicist, on engineer or anyone else who 'thinks' they know maths teach you maths, find a mathematician