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If your goal is to become a sculptor, it’s worth your while to try chiseling a wheel out of stone. Just for practice, you know. Reinventing the wheel isn’t always a bad thing. It gives you a lot of insight and skill in an area you’re starting out in. I believe [...]

To an adult language learner, the first language is always the hardest. It makes a lot of sense to pick an easy language from the start. That’s absolutely fine if you’re interested in learning, say, Spanish. But maybe you don’t wanna study Spanish for a year. Maybe you want to learn [...]

When mastering any discipline, you’re bound to run into the Plateau Effect from time to time. For awhile, your mastery increases steadily through training or studying, but then you begin to experience diminishing returns. The slope of mastery versus time evens out, until you reach the plateau point, when it seems like further [...]

When people ask me, “What math should I study so I can (fill in the blank)”, the answer I give them isn’t quite what they expect. The best answer to this question is: whichever mathematics you think is the most fun and interesting. This answer doesn’t depend at all on what (blank) [...]

In order to improve the blog, I’m gonna teach myself JavaScript tonight. The main thing I’m looking at is setting it up so the AdSense advertisements don’t show up for regular readers, just for visitors from search engines. In Wordpress, there’s a plugin to do this, but my attempt to convert to Wordpress wasn’t as [...]

Once in sixth grade mathclass, I misplaced a graded quiz on fractions. Mrs. Locatelli called me to her desk while we were doing work on our own, and started discussing what we were gonna do, because by sheer misfortune, she had managed to delete the grade as well. The situation looked difficult, until I reminded [...]

An autodidact is a self-teacher. In other words when you teach yourself things on your own, enjoying the freedom of being absolutely self-paced. I’ve been teaching myself for most of my life, starting when I taught myself the BASIC programming language on an old Tandy my family found outside the UCSD student housing dumpsters. Later [...]

I’ve been an autodidact– that is, a self-teacher– since almost as far back as I can remember. One of the earliest things I remember teaching myself was the BASIC programming language, when my family found an old Tandy Computer with MS-DOS outside the dumpsters at UCSD. (Ok, I’ll admit, my mom helped me initially with [...]

Consider this. You make five flashcards for Russian vocabulary words. Russian word on one side, English on the other. Review those cards 20 times a day for a week. At the end of the week, you’ll know those words really well. Now deposit those cards in the bank with instructions to keep them hidden from [...]

Here are some ways you can become better at mathematics.
1. Realize there’s nothing magic or special about mathematics.
Mathematics has a lot in common with cooking: applying “recipes” (algorithms) to cook up desired results. Math has a lot in common with sports and games: doing as much as you can while still following certain (sometimes [...]