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Comment by WesleyJohnson | Hacker News Reader

I lost interest in school around the 10th or 11th grade. I never took any math classes beyond what was required to graduate way back in '96 in Florida. I also didn't go to college.

I've been a professional web developer since 2005 and a development manager (who still codes) since 2017. I don't understand the first thing about Calculus or even logarithms. I'm sure if I did, I'd probably be a better developer. I've had employees try to explain to me fairly basic log notation and my eyes just glaze over. It's never impacted my abilities, nor the respect and admiration I get from them as a well-experienced and knowledgable developer, but I can't help but feel ignorant.

I need to go back to the basics and work my way up; I've lost a lot of it. Where do I start? Kahn Academy?

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You probably understand logs intuitively. Don’t worry about notation, here’s the idea: sometimes we count digits, not values.

When we say someone has a 6 figure salary, we are counting how many 0’s (10s) to takes to get there.

For memory, we say something has 32 bits and can have 2^32 possible values. It’s more graspable to talk about the “address size” vs the “number of possible values”, especially for things that grow fast (like storage).

I’d suggest starting with your intuitions and slowly translating them to math.

(Without being a shill, I wrote about real world logs here, it may help: https://betterexplained.com/articles/using-logs-in-the-real-...)

Thanks. I'll take a look!

Khan Academy is great, but there are also an incredible number of great youtube videos. I would watch this 3blue1brown video to see if you like his style : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUvTyaaNkzM

Thanks for the recommendation. Bookmarked

> go back to the basics and work my way up; I've lost a lot of it. Where do I start?

You might want to check out my book "No Bullshit Guide to Math & Physics," which starts with a high school math review, and goes up to calculus. It's specifically written for adult learners (self contained + lots of practice exercises).

You can see a PDF preview here https://minireference.com/static/excerpts/noBSmathphys_v5_pr...

The concept map from the book is independently useful to check out: https://minireference.com/static/conceptmaps/math_and_physic... And you should also check out this SymPy tutorial https://minireference.com/static/tutorials/sympy_tutorial.pd... which can help you build a bridge between coding skills and math operations.

Nice. I like the idea of bridging coding skills with math operations. Definitely will take a look. Thank you.

A lot of math is cumulative, i.e. built on top of the prior concepts/tools. There are some things that are effectively the start of their own branches, but a lot of them then go back into a tangle of general mathematics that's all deeply interrelated, and also a subject onto itself when you get into ways to convert problems into totally different representations to use other mathematical tools on them.

In your case, follow something like Khan academy through the normal grade school programs to pick up where you left off and work backwards on picking up any concepts you're weak on then pursue whatever threads interest you. Wolfram can also help you look up specific things or find necessary formulas if, e.g. you just need the formula for a cone or to know how to integrate sin().

> I need to go back to the basics and work my way up; I've lost a lot of it. Where do I start?

One very good place to start is Precalculus Mathematics in a Nutshell: Geometry, Algebra, Trigonometry by George F. Simmons (less than 150 pages!).

Just a meta comment: Don't think of calculus as hard in the same way learning a language or learning to paint is hard. Calculus is more of a gotcha moment. You fumble in the dark for a few focused hours (or minutes) and then you Get It. From then on it's relatively easy.

If I had to sort those - painting, learning a language, calculus. So, yeah, it seems hard to me. But I've never truly given it a lot of attention. That there is an "aha" moment for some, is promising.

I liked Khan Academy. Got me all the way through Mechanical Engineering and I didn't start until I was 38

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