Crash course in mathematics: Introduction

Good day, my students.

Let's go right down to business. The first thing that I, as your friendly teacher, has to do, is to set your expectations of this crash course right.

If Mathematics is an ocean, then this is an elementary swimming course. You will learn how to swim in shallow water and maybe snorkel dive a little. I am not going to teach you how to sail across the ocean or dive into its bottomless deeps. I do hope though, to change your mind about mathematics and open the way for you, to explore it further. In fact, that is my primary goal.

Many people feel that when it comes to mathematics, they are a lost case. It's not the enormity of the ocean that despairs them, but the fact that they can't even tip their toes in it. They feel that they fail to wrap their heads around​ very basic stuff like natural fractions arithmetic or basic geometry. I am sure that some of the readers feel uncomfortable, even reading me mentioning these terms.

I think there is no reason why it should be this way. I mean, I know why it happens, but I think that the notion that mathematics is something that only a small elite can wrap their heads around, is unjustifiable. The basic skills that are needed in order to be able to use mathematics in a basic, yet an extremely useful level, are not harder to grasp than those that are needed in order to learn how to read and write. Yet, while most children are able to read and write fluently by the end of elementary school, when it comes to math, many of the same students are left behind. Why? Well the answer is quite obvious. Math is not being taught correctly.

I don't want to waste time, ranting about the state of math teaching in the standard Western education system. I think doing so will also not be fair to many wonderful teachers who many times do a great job. But if you feel that you “suck at math”, this course may be your chance to discover that you were simply not taught mathematics in the right way, and change your mind about mathematics and about yourself.

So what are we going to learn in this course? In order to make things clear and organized, I created below a framework for the course content. As I post new lessons, this framework will gradually turn into the course's index. A note at the beginning of each lesson will point the readers back to this introduction and to the course index - A reminder of the first rule of math: Always return to the basics.

I hope you will enjoy the course,

Oren

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Course framework and index

• Part 1: How mathematicians think

-- Lesson 1: Mathematical thinking
-- Lesson 2: Estimations and skeptism
-- Lesson 3: The hunter and the cook
-- Lesson 4: The genesis of numbers

• Part 2: The fundamental skillset

• Part 3: Mathematical metaphors

• Part 4: Logic, reasoning and inference

• Part 5: All the math you have to know

• Part 6: Conclusion and going further