Where is a good place to brush up on some math?

Question

Math skills are becoming more and more essential, I'm wonder where is a good place to brush up on some basics before moving on to some more CompSci specific stuff?

A sight with lots of video's as well as practise exercises would be a double win but I cant seem to find one.

Answer 1

A lot of the universities will actually publish their lecture materials online. So all you really need to do is find a suitable subject and then read the lecture materials and do the associated work. If you were really sneaky you could probably also go to the tutorials to get help :P

Answer 2

BetterExplained.com has some great math lectures. Its not video lectures but the author gives easy-to-understand explanations on math concepts.

Answer 3

It depends on your math level. You should start by revising what you should know till that moment and then go further to algorithm mathmatics, geometry (transforms and etc), statistics and more.

There are tons of places on the internet were you can learn:

http://www.math.cornell.edu/Courses/courses.html

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/courses/index.htm

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/

and the list is open.

Answer 4

I recommend http://projecteuler.net if you want to train number theory and discrete maths. Lots of fun exercises, though you need to know a bit of programming.

Answer 5

I will be boring and recommend actually taking university courses in math. Without lectures and lessons with an assistant I know I would never be able to learn as much as I have. I just need some kind of motivation, since higher math is really hard.

That is, if you are looking for quite advanced stuff and actually want to get a deep understanding and don't want to crunch numbers. Crunching numbers is why we have MATLAB ;)

It would be good to know what level of math you have, and what you want to do with it. But I guess calculus, linear algebra and discrete math are the most useful courses to take.

Answer 6

Don't forget that iTunes now has available a load of maths lectures (and other subjects) from various mainstream universities - and all for free.

Answer 7

I suggest books with good tutorials throughout if you're unable to partake in a maths course. For computer science-related maths Don Knuth's Concrete Mathematics is meant to be very good.

Obviously nothing can replace a good teacher, but good tutorials can come pretty damn close. You really get to learn the subject in the tutorials I think.

Answer 8

Steve Yegge had a good blog post Math for programmers

Quoting some of it:

"But a few things I've learned recently might surprise you:

1. Math is a lot easier to pick up after you know how to program. In fact, if you're a halfway decent programmer, you'll find it's almost a snap.

2. They teach math all wrong in school. Way, WAY wrong. If you teach yourself math the right way, you'll learn faster, remember it longer, and it'll be much more valuable to you as a programmer.

3. Knowing even a little of the right kinds of math can enable you do write some pretty interesting programs that would otherwise be too hard. In other words, math is something you can pick up a little at a time, whenever you have free time.

4. Nobody knows all of math, not even the best mathematicians. The field is constantly expanding, as people invent new formalisms to solve their own problems. And with any given math problem, just like in programming, there's more than one way to do it. You can pick the one you like best.

5. Math is... ummm, please don't tell anyone I said this; I'll never get invited to another party as long as I live. But math, well... I'd better whisper this, so listen up: (it's actually kinda fun.)"