Autodidactism

By Kareem Carr

Autodidactism is the art of self-learning or self-teaching.

It is not unusual to have to teach yourself a bit of mathematics.  Here are a few resources you might find helpful.

1. An AMS guide (warning pdf) for good books to read by topic.

2. An extensive MAA guide to good books to read.  It is arranged by topic with ratings.  For instance, here is the abstract algebra page.

3. MIT open course ware

4. Academic Earth has a few courses on video.

5. Here is one more link that is near to my heart. Feed some hungry kids and learn some new words at the same time.  At no cost to you, they donate rice for every word you get right.

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3 Responses to Autodidactism

  1. Mgccl says:

    Let’s suppose I can do a word per 10 seconds. that is 360 words per hour and 3600 grains of rice per hour…How much is that? Less than a bowl? And that requires me to get every single word correct.

    An hour in exchange for a bowl of rice? That’s way below the minimal wage. I’m sure people… especially grad students can do things much more useful in those time.

    I don’t think this is the best way to learn new words anyway. a click, you see the definition, and its gone.

    Cooler idea.
    Free rice… MATH version… and not multiple choice problems…
    Because you have to actually… DO the problems…
    Of course, depend on the difficulty, each problem will get different amount of rice.

  2. Kareem Carr says:

    Dear Mgccl,

    Instead of thinking of the effects individually, you can think about the charitable effect of 100 math graduate students doing this for 1 hour a week, having fun, increasing their vocabulary and contributing in excess of 100 bowls of rice per month.

    One of the things that drew me to the site is the learning algorithm is very sophisticated and it repeats words that you have missed. It’s also adaptive and adjusts to the level of your vocabulary.

  3. anon says:

    Thanks Kareem for the great links.

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