Does anyone have any recommendations on the best routes to go when re-learning math later in life? I'm a big fan of online courses—and am ideally looking for a platform that sets a solid foundation and progresses into more advanced math topics.
Maybe something like Khan Academy would be a good route to go? I want to look at all my options.
This is my favorite youtube channel. He makes advanced math videos and some videos on applications of math in cs such as Cryptography, Information Theory and Deep Learning.
Most of the videos don’t require prior knowledge other than basic algebra. For the ones that do, he has made some series to teach them. They include the essence of calculus, linear algebra, etc.
I'd recommend getting a copy of Mathematica. The home/hobby version is only $376 for the desktop version though you could start on the cloud version for less. MMA is great for checking your algebra (the bane of my math work) and graphing and using it for "what if" questions.
Also, hang out on the math and mma stackexchange forums and read posts and when something interesting strikes you dig in. Years ago I discovered that the lemniscate is the inverse transform of the hyperbola. It wasn't a formal proof but close enough and I was pretty excited about discovering something like that on my own. Also, check out John D. Cook's and Daniel LeMire's blogs for interesting ideas to investigate.
Enjoy!
If you follow along you will get a solid foundation accompanied by a lot of "aha" moments.
However, if you have a community college that offers night classes at an affordable rate I would choose this path. The reason being once you reach calculus and beyond having a real living human being there to help you understand the concepts is something that is invaluable. Especially Calculus 3 (or the equivalent "vector calculus" course) where it gets very hard to wrap your head around things like divergence, curl, flux, etc. Calculus based probability is another course where having someone available really helps. Personally, things like differential equations can probably be self-taught if you have a very strong foundation in calculus. But if you're not strong there, you will want to also take classes at the university for that.
If you can't get into a class for whatever reason and you want to go online I would use only MITx. I've taken several online courses from them and the quality is superb. They run courses with real humans available for questions and you can usually get things answered quickly. Pay for the verified track for leverage.
It goes without saying you also should spend time on a forum dedicated to math. Physics forums is a good place where you can ask questions and get answers.
I highly recommend also looking into the open university (https://www.open.ac.uk/courses) as an option. Their costs are affordable and the education is top notch (though strangely organized if you're from America).
You have to click the multiple playlist titles (the ones with left/right sliding arrows) to see all the playlists for that category because YouTube truncates the lists.
I need to add more courses (including a few more basic ones) but YouTube has a memory leak issue that prevents me from doing so right now.
If you watch one course I would recommend Bill Shillto's only course.
However, I got a question, where to buy/find all math textbooks a kid would use in USA? I tried, but can't any clues on this. Since I am eager to check how USA kids learn math from grade 1 straight to the undergraduate.
A website called WorldCat, but seems lack school textbooks.
I just need a complete textbook lists of grade 1 math -- undergraduate math. I understand different schools may use different textbooks, but where to find the catalog? I can't find them!
I'd recommend agda as a place to start.