I believe it is within my best interest to start relearning Math over from scratch, and I am unsure of how exactly I should begin to tackle such a massive goal.
I am a dropout, and in preparation for my GED, I spent 2 months cramming every single Khan Academy video I could down my throat and did it all until it stuck.
I passed my tests with honors, but now it's a month later and I haven't practiced any Math at all, and I have forgotten all of it, and I would like to take my TSI entry exam and go to college for Comp Sci.
I believe that my problem is that I don't know Math. I simply haven't been taught it. I have been trained. I trained myself to do all the problems and what not, and now I've forgotten the training because of a lack of practice.
I sit here and try to do a long division problem, but I am constantly looking up what steps to do in order to do the problem, because I don't know how long division itself works. I only know how to do a procedure that I have remembered. I lack the knowledge to do things for real.
Therefore I come to you, Veeky Forums, asking for help.
How can I begin the process of learning Math, up to Algebra 1 and High School level Geometry? What books can you recommend me? I am ready to start ASAP. I'm also ready to try as hard as I ever have tried at something before, and willing to go with it as long as it will take. Please help me start.
To further explain what I mean, I take the fraction 5/8.
If I were asked to convert 5/8 into a decimal, then I would say "ok. so divide the top by the bottom." and I would do so and reach 0.625(assuming of course I didn't get side tracked with re-training myself to divide).
So 0.625 is the correct answer. I know this. But I do not know why it is the correct answer. Therefore it is suffice to say I do not understand decimals or fractions at all. I simply know how to do some of the problems.
And this is a problem that's affluent with a lot of math related things I do. But I do not know where to begin in learning the correct things.
I can sit here and memorize Khan Academy videos until I can apply the procedures Sal does to similar problems in the videos, but as soon as a problem comes up I don't have a procedure for, I'm stumped. I don't want this anymore.
Am I making any sense?
Aaron Fisher
There's no "why" as for 5/8 = 0.625. Both are just different notations of the same thing.
You should read books on functions and/or geometry first. The wiki should help.
Asher Collins
>But I do not know why it is the correct answer
How many times can 8 cut up/divide/go into 5 evenly? 0 with a remainder of 5.
Now if we wanted to do better with a finer answer, we can figure out how many tenths of 8 (0.8) go into 5 or equivalently how many times 8 goes into 5 scaled up by 10 ie 50 (because 5 is 50 tenths). You can go 8-16-24-32-40-48 times so 6 tenths(.6) of 8 go into 5 giving a remainder of 2 tenths(0.2). Now looking for the hundredths of an 8 that can go into the remainder of 0.2 (ie .2 / .08) or conversely number of 8 hundredths we can pull out of 20 hundredths. We can get 2 more leaving 20-16=4 hundredths so we have 6 tenths 0.6 plus 2 hundredths we just pulled out or .6 +.02=.62 with a remainder of 4 hundredths which in decimal is 0.04. And then with thousandths of an 8 (.008) that goes into .04 we see 5*.008=.04 so .008 goes into .04 5 times with no remainder so we add 5 thousandths to .62 and get .62+.005=.625 as a final answer.
Oliver Brown
Alright. I suppose I should have first checked for a wiki for this board before diving into this whole thing. Right now I'm trying to just gather up the necessary resources I need to begin the relearning process.
Are there any books specifically you can recommend personally? I'm going to try to get the best I can find.
I'm gonna head over to the wiki for a bit and see what I can dig up in the mean time.
Nicholas Cruz
>Are there any books specifically you can recommend personally? I speak French, sorry. But I would recommand paying a close attention to the fundamentals of analysis, like what is exactly a derivative, what is a limit, what is a function. Those are vitals in almost every other aspect.
Wyatt Davis
Any book will be fine, don't worry about that. Just use whatever your local community college is using, because that's good enough trust me.
Connor Perez
I'm not in the community college, I'm in a french Uni.
We're using some papers written by the teachers themselves. This one is about logic and mathematical expression, but I don't think it can of much use if you don't speak French yourself :/
Alright so I've looked over the wiki a bit, and I've looked over some recommendations from stack exchange, and so far my book list is stacking up to really high levels. I'm going to start trying to narrow things down now, since most of the posts I'm coming across now are just "lel go look at Khan Academy!"
That being said, here's what I've gathered up so far: >Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning by Thomas A. Garrity >"Mathematical Logic" by We Li >The Square Root of Two by David Flannery Then I start getting to books related to subjects. > Calculus - Volume 1 and 2 by Tom Apostol >Linear Algebra by Georgi Shilov >Elements by Euclid > Elementary Number Theory by Charles Vanden Eynden >Differential Geometry by Erwin Kreyszig
I'm not sure which of these are good to read or not. Particularly the first three I listed. I am a bit skeptical of The Square Root of Two because that sounds a bit like pop-math.
How's this list looking so far? Anything I should add?
