I am starting IT studies. As someone always interested in computers I have paths in my head how to get needed information. There is also a luxury of testing anything learn in practice by for ex. contributing to open source or creating a server.
Math was always interesting for me too, but I haven’t spend time on learning it much, I have many lacks from middle school and there are topics I know about but can’t use them in practice or have no intuition or forgot how to formally write them.
So I started to try to learn, as a self-learner most time I spend on Wikipedia and forums, but those turned out to be death end when it comes to understanding whole topic and not just reminding one thing.
So question to you that are learning math: how do you do so? And I also never learned anything in a typical “school” way, I always need to feel interest or have a goal in something.
For math, it really depends on what you’re doing. The overwhelming majority of software simply uses conditionals (if this, then that), and it also structures and consumes data. If you’re working on stuff like calculating stress of physical structures, then some math may be involved. But even then, unless you’re innovating in a specific field, you’ll often use prior art from solved problems.
For example, if you want to write some math to create a reverb on sound, we’ve done that before. If you want to forecast trends, we’ve done that, too. Machine learning and AI is accompanied by a lot of open source libraries, so you can just install a lib and use it.