Update – 5/22/2012

Everything is going swimmingly.  I am continuing to improve and regain the skills I once had.  Right now I am focusing on polynomials. I found a new resource, which, in addition to Khan Academy, is proving quite fruitful. There is an organization called CK12, which provides free text books on a number of subjects.  Their math material only goes up to Calculus, but their books are clear and concise and contain a number of practice questions at the end of each section. One thing I like, which I didn’t at first, is the fact that the books lack the answers to the practice questions. Initially, I was discouraged by this, because, if I was stuck on a problem, I wasn’t able to see the answer and try to work backwards. What I have found however, is that it forced me to check my work. I’ve found that, with a little diligence, I can figure out most problems on my own, and more importantly, be confident that I have found the correct solution.

I’m getting more and more excited as all this knowledge comes back to me.  Right now I am working on polynomials, and I am finding that I need to pace myself due to a desire to be further ahead than I am.  But I feel like I am improving at a pace that will allow me to re-enter my mathematics education at the spot where I left off.  I have about 2 weeks until my summer classes start and about 10 weeks thereafter to re-learn all of the algebra a college student wanting to take trigonometry should know. I feel like that is plenty of time.

In the meantime, I am grinding out hundred of math problems and I’m not tiring of it. I feel like I have more mathematical stamina than I did when I started this endeavor years ago.  Back then, I could do algebra for about an hour to 90 minutes before things stopped making sense.  It was very weird; I would be working on my homework and bam, at the 90 minute mark, all the equations that made sense to me just an hour and a half ago, turned to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. It may be because I already knew this stuff, but I hope that’s not the case.

Pythagora's Theorem at Work

Reblogged from Dropping the Science:

All Quiet

Nothing new to report.  I was out of town all week on a business trip and so I had little time to practice my math. I’m still hitting Khan Academy pretty hard though.  I’ve decided to go all the way back to the beginning of algebra, and power through, just to make sure I don’t have any holes in my knowledge. So far, so good, however, I’m having a lot of trouble with the age word problems.  Things like “Nadia is 2 times as old as Brandon. Twenty-four years ago, Nadia was 8 times as old as Brandon. How old is Brandon now?” are really tripping me up.  I can solve the equation just fine, it’s extracting the equation from the narrative that is getting me.  I suppose that’s a skill I am going to need in the future, especially if I focus on applied math.

This is a short post, as I have little to say, but I just want to get in the habit of writing on here every week or so.

Back At It

Man, it’s been a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo *breath* oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time since I wrote on this blog.  I haven’t yet become a mathematician.  In fact, I failed Trigonometry.  Well, I gave up on it, so to speak.  It was a rough semester, and I ended up dropping out of college all together, for numerous reason.  But the pull of math is once again upon me, as strong as ever.

I’m not going to go into everything that has happened since then and now, because it would take way too long, but let’s look at where I am, math-wise.

I still feel quite comfortable with my algebra skills, even though I haven’t had a math class since I last wrote.  I’m heading back to school at my local community college this summer, and expect to be back in math classes by the fall. Until then, I am brushing up on my math at the wonderful Khan Academy. Man, I wish this site had been around back in the day. I’m currently re-learning all of the algebra one would be expected to know after College Algebra in order to avoid having to re-take it.  I’d like to be able to start where I left off, which was at Trig.  At my community college, I really only have to place above Intermediate Algebra in order to take Trig again, but I’d really hate to have to take College Algebra again.

My class for the summer isn’t a math class (Microeconomics), so that way, I can give myself a buffer over the summer and really prepare to hit Math hard again in the fall. I haven’t actually decided whether to jump right back into trig, or take statistics first. Statistics would be good for my current job, so I might go that route, and I think I have to take them both before I get into Calculus.  My ultimate goal is to get an associates and transfer to my state university and get a bachelor’s in Mathematics. 

My university requires a concentration for a BS in Math, but that’s a long ways away.  Still, it’s fun to think about.  I’m leaning towards either Economics or Statistics, because I’d like to be able to take a set of data and make predictions about it, but without having exposure to high-level maths, or even medium-level maths, it’s really just taking shots in the dark.  It’ll probably take me another year and a half or so before I’m even to the point of thinking about what concentration to take.

So anyways, I’m back, I’m studying math again, and I’m writing about it

I ain’t dead yet!

The semester has started and I’m off with a bang.  I’ve been absent from this blog due to a two week gap in between summer and fall semester, and these past two weeks have been extremely busy with fraternity mumbo jumbo. 

Math for this semester is trigonometry and I have a really good feeling about it.  We took our first exam today, over similar triangles and the basic trigonometric functions with applications on right triangles.  All extremely elementary stuff, I’m sure, but hey, it’s new to me!

My teacher is fairly hardcore.  She does not tolerate nonsense in her class like showing up late or sleeping.  This is good for me because I have (had, in the past at least) a tendency to do both of these things.  Her tests are also fairly challenging as I found out today.  No more multiple-choice for me, hehe!  It’s a good thing though, I suppose.  I’m very confident in what I’ll learn.  The advisor for the math department said if I can earn a good grade in her class I will be well prepared for calculus.

 It’s hard to believe I embarked on this journey a mere three months ago.  I feel like I have come so far and yet I know I have barely begun to scratch the membrane of the surface of mathematics.  Right now I feel like an old ’49er gold miner.  I’ve started off with my bare hands, and have now graduated to a hammer and chisel. The ultimate goal is to have a plutonium-powered, earth-chewing monster drill to unearth the mother-lode and begin to understand all that which escapes me.

The End of Summer

I got a B in my College Algebra class. I’m not sure what I got on the final, but I must have aced it because I had a C going into it. I’m usually my own worst enemy, but I’m actually very proud of that. For anyone who knows me, simply completing the class was a feat in its own right. Especially at 7:30 in the morning.

In the past, when I didn’t know why the hell I was in college, I would follow a general pattern. Basically I would be psyched as hell to be in school for the first 4-6 weeks of a class. Then I would start to skip now and then, or not do assignments, or get behind in some way or another. Eventuall, a little after half-way past the semester, I would give up. By then it was too late to drop with a W, and I’d get an F.

What I’ve learned this summer, in addition to the course material, is the value of persistence. I basically passed this class by a sheer act of will. Old me would have thrown my arms up and yelled “I QUIT!” at receiving a D on a test. I would have never believed I could pull my grade out from where it was. But the week leading up to the final belonged to that class. And so I came out with a B.

I’ve decided not take the class over again. I will, however, be keeping my college algebra book. It’s got a bazillion problems for me to practice on and I will make it a point to throughout the fall semester to practice algebra on a regular basis.

More important that being satisfied with the grades I got over the summer, I am very pleased with overcoming whatever has held me back in the past with regards to school. I am now confident that I can accomplish this goal.

The little things

I ended up getting a 98% on the test I took on monday covering the only stuff I’ve considered fun in this class so far. I’m pretty excited about that because depending on how well I do on the final and what grade I get on the re-take tomorrow, it could very well save my grade.

The last chapter covered in this class as really been encouraging. I thought I might not be as interested as I thought, but learning those topics and by doing well at them, I showed myself that I do have a capacity for this. Having never been even this far in mathematics, I may be viewed as a grade schooler learning fractions may be. I’m ok with that.

As I see it, I have two options after this class. If I pass, continue on to my trigonometry course, and either review the algebra I learned in this class on my own, or I can set myself back and re-take it with an instructor (Which would be the more noble course of action?). Regardless, I know that I will be spending much more time in the university’s new math and science tutoring center during the next semester.

A musician friend once told me that if you are sincerely devoted to something, you will be amused by the little things. He would sit for ours playing simple one-note songs on his guitar, just getting a feel for how the strings felt as he plucked them. I suppose this is the stage I am at right now.

Obstacles

Thank you for the word of encouragement on my last post, tdstephens3. I’m pretty excited that I already got a comment on my blog and it’s only been up for less than one day.

I was studying all night to retake a test that I got a D on in this class and the section on hyperbolas has been kicking my ass all night. I think I’ve sort of got it, but figuring out the asymptotes of hyperbolas that are not centered on the origin still escapes me.

In his comment, tdstephens3 stressed the importance of being able to perform these tedious computations with confidence. I’m thinking that I’m going to have to retake this college algebra class so that I can be confident in my abilities. Everyone has stressed the importance of these skills further down the road and I don’t want to dive in unprepared. I just think that 5 weeks isn’t long enough to give me the skills I need to progress. It’s an unfortunate setback, but these are the obstacles in my path and I can either give up or take the time to get around them.

Does math tell you why?

I’ve been meditating a lot on why I want to study math, and not just study but know math, and although my I’m still positive that math is the direction I need to take my life, I’m unclear as to why.

During my college algebra class (which ends friday, thank god, no more 7:30 classes!), my resolve began to flag a bit. I was beginning to get downtrodden by my low test scores, and discouraged because work was cutting into study time and disillusioned because I wasn’t finding the subject matter all the intriguing. But I plugged along, and blessed are the five-week summer classes, because in the middle of last week we got the final chapter in the book titled “Advanced Topics in Algebra”, which lightly touches on the more exciting things to come, giving me just a nibble, then fueling my hunger and drive and interest.

I don’t know why this final chapter piqued my interest so much; maybe it’s because I didn’t have to graph shit. What’s more dull than finding an arbitrary point on a parabola, or discribing where the vertices, foci, axes, and asymptotes of hyperbolas? That’s a rhretorical question, I don’t want to know what it is if such a thing exists.

This last chapter went over the basics of sequences and series, the binomial theorem, and probability. There was also a section on induction that my instructor skipped, but I read anyway. I finally learned what a bunch of cryptic mathematical notation means, such as the sigma summation notation, permutations and combinations, and other cool stuff that will allow me to understand more of the things I want to read on my own.

I know I have a long way to go before I’m actually taking classes that deal with these types of fun things. I wonder, are the things going on underneath the hood of these mundane computations I’ll be forced to endure really as cool as they look?

Introduction

This is apparently the definition of a definite integral. I have no idea what that means; but I want to.

Within the past nine months, something happened to me. I became aware of a growing void, a hunger that could only be filled with Mathematics. I’m not sure what caused it, but it was pretty much like I woke up one morning and was like “I need to study math.”

So that’s what I’m doing. Having not taken a math class in almost seven years, I re-enrolled in school and declared Mathematics as my major. I’m starting from scratch (i.e. intermediate algebra), so it’s going to be a long road, but it has become what drives drives me.

So here is where I’m at right now. In June, after much tribulation regarding financial aid, I started my journey at the very lowest math class offered by my university, Intermediate Algebra. The teacher sucked, but I managed to pass with a B+. I’m currently in my last week of College Algebra, and this class hasn’t gone so hot. The teacher’s great, but due to schedule conflicts, I haven’t been able to study as much as in the previous class. Our final is this Friday, and I’m not sure how well it’s going to go.

I’ve seen a fair share of nay-sayers and doubters; I’ve gotten plenty of odd looks when I tell people that I’m studying Mathematics and they ask me how far along I am. “College Algebra,” I say. “Huh,” they ponder. How is that going to work? they think. A friend of mine suggested I study something like English or journalism, because it’s something that I was good at in high school and interests me but what’s the point of paying tens of thousands of dollars to learn something you already know? Mathematics is completely alien to me and the whole I will be learning something entirely new to me throughout this entire experience.

It might be good to explain a bit of my history with Mathematics. During high school I never went further than Algebra II. I think I may have taken a statistics class but I’m pretty sure I failed it. I don’t remember anything in it, so for all intents and purposes I didn’t take it. Perhaps it was poor teachers, or that an interest in math was never fostered in me, but in high school, math was never important. Well, not just math, I wasn’t really a good student in general. I did excel in English class, and I was a prodigy in my German class.

I was inspired by a thread I saw on a forum that followed a man’s transformation from not being able to draw a stick figure to an amazing painter. This blog will be an account of my passage from mathematical no-nothing to Mathemagician.