FWIW my experiences with MathAcademy roughly overlap OP’s: it’s really hard work and adult life seriously interferes with making speedy progress (notice their own success stories are with teenagers who can devote hours upon hours on racing through the - very good - curriculum).

They say 1 point is equivalent to 1 minute of work and that you should earn at least 45 points a day. Well, for me 1 point is nowhere near 1 minute of work: I’m sloppy and sometimes downright stupid so it’s 1,5 minutes at best and often much, much more.

Banging your head against a wall every day for more than an hour (sometimes much more) just to get to what they consider to be the minimum of 45 points is no fun, and probably even counterproductive. I managed to keep it up for four months and made reasonable progress during that time (on getting back to where I was at the end of High School, 30 years ago) but it also burnt me out. I’ve now scaled it back to 30 minutes (not points!) a day. As a result my progress is now glacial.

Also, they’re very much of the “just do lots of problems and you’ll learn mathematic concepts and principles by osmosis” school of math instruction. For me I had to buy a textbook to get some extra explanation.

The good thing is that the problems seem well thought out and the spaced repetition system definitely works (for me, anyway).

I’m going to keep it up, because I have enough disposable income to afford it (though it is much too expensive for what it is) and I really want to bring my math skills up to a level where I can follow along the math in ML papers (and also because math, it turns out, is kind of elegant and interesting). I could go the self-study route, but then I’d have to spend time and effort guiding myself and figuring out what it is I needed to work on. If nothing else, MathAcademy is good at taking care of this for you so you can focus on the math itself.

You can do all of that without paying a monthly fee. You just need a library card (or know of a person called Anna and her archive ;) ) and a list of books. These are the ones I used:

Precalculus by Axler

Calculus (Ninth Edition) by Thomas

Linear Algebra by Lay

How To Prove It by Velleman

Understanding Analysis by Abbott <--- I'm currently here

Much, much, much cheaper than paying $50/month. What I've spent most on so far has been printer paper and fountain pen ink because I do exercises by hand instead of using a tablet/iPad but in total this expense has been waaaaay under $50.

$49 seems a surprisingly high amount for something aimed at students and learners - I appreciate the content may be good, but it's effectively 3 times a Netflix subscription.

It's meant to be something you stick with in the "long term" by its nature, and yet an annual subscription is $500 - this is just completely unrealistic for any student. Someone in a lower end job hoping to "up skill" is going to really struggle with this.

I forget where I originally saw this, but someone put together a document titled "How to Take all the Math Classes You Need." (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1G-hSdO5Tm9Nc6E4GobZZlwD0...)

While it assumes a level of competence of basic algebra, it essentially mimics a self-study math major and provides links to lecture recordings, widely used textbooks, problem sets, and answer banks to said problem sets. You obviously have to be self-motivated, but it beats paying $50 per month for the service OP's post links to.

I recently stopped my MathAcademy subscription: I went from halfway through Math Foundations II through to near the end of Linear Algebra. I stopped because I realised I wasn't really learning maths, I was just learning to answer the questions by rote.

The way that they pretty much completely omit all the explanation, proofs and discussion you get in traditional maths education really limits its utility once you get to more advanced content. I think the reason for a lot of the positive reviews is that their approach works really well early on when you're revising the basic end-of high-school stuff.

I'm surprised Kahn Academy hasn't been mentioned. It's free and from my experience pretty good. Though I'm not a parent or teacher so I can't speak from either of those viewpoints.

If you need to get into math and are not really motivated I can recommend 3blue1Brown by Grant Sanderson (https://www.3blue1brown.com/). The best part is not only, that he explains math problems in an easy way, but also show how to approach math problems in general. I think it’s one of the best sources to start with Math.

This could’ve been written by me, it so closely matches my own experience. I know too well the “hit with a bag of bricks” realization that much of your professional life has been more or less you winging it. Math has that tendency of shining a bright ugly light on your real capability. It’s deeply humbling.

I’ve been using MathAcademy, trying to do at least one lesson each night after the kid is asleep. But instead of rote memorization, I sit with each problem until I truly and deeply understand it.

It’s going to be a long time before I’m mathematically competent, but there’s nowhere to go but up.

I used math academy for several months. I was curious and wanted to try it out since it’s a problem I’ve also worked on in the past. Th system is good, the fractional spaced repetition is a nice system and really reduces the spaced repetition overhead. Still IMHO, it provides nowhere near the value of the $50 a month pricing. But again I also know a lot of higher level mathematics and can work my way through a topology book on my own, so I’m probably not in the target audience. Still, I would think that even for people wanting to get into math or high school students this would still be a very steep price.

Oh another monthly subscription with no accredited learning.

If you want to actually learn mathematics, buy Open University book sets and work through them. MU123 -> MST124 -> MST125 -> M208 -> MST224. Diversion of M140 if you want stats. They are written by actual professionals, the course is accredited and if you like it you can turn that into an actual qualification as well. All the textbooks are in-house written over the space of over 40 years (!) and designed for self-learning.

The whole set is on github somewhere as well if I remember - search for it.

I’m interested in learning math, theoretical physics, electronic engineering, welding, and AI/ML.

But, when you don’t even focus on basic self-care, you sleep terribly, suffer depression, ADD, etc., you’ll never get past just browsing someone’s page of links to educational material to actually developing the habits you need to learn.

If someone could solve that, I’d pay them $50/mo.

I'm also on foundations 3 at this point and love the system. I combine it with Anki to reinforce the retention of older material, and I find the price very reasonable for something that helps me learn math consistently.

As for the price, I see people mentioning text books as a cheaper alternative, but Math Academy includes review work, tests, and retakes when necessary. It takes care of the organizing and evaluating that is related to but not the same as the learning. You can focus on being a student, without having to also be the teacher.

I would love a full depth, accredited system that didn't cost thousands of dollars.

I'm at 10k points after a couple months. Previous experience was self-teaching linear algebra, which I needed for cryptography work, and I managed well enough to help my daughter cruise through a proofs-heavy linear algebra course at UIUC; I'd have aced it if I took it. I started doing MathAcademy for two reasons: to replace an NYT crossword habit with something more rewarding, and because I have (had) no calculus. I do about 250 points per week.

Math Academy is --- so far --- probably one of the better dollars-for-skills trades I've made in my adult life, easily outstripping every book I've ever bought.

I have a lot of gripes!

* The gamification is really annoying as an adult learner. There are lots of little cues in the system to keep moving forward, which pushes me past what feels like the limits of retention. There is no credential Math Academy can give me that I give a shit about, so moving faster for the sake of it is a bad trade for me.

* Along similar lines, I really wish it was easier to get more explicit review. Part of the premise of Math Academy is that the spaced repetition comes in large part from units that build on each other; you're making relentless forward progress with reviews baked into new material. I've at times had to have o4-mini make me problem sets, which seems dumb since I'm paying for exactly that from Math Academy.

* "Foundations", the adult learning series, is premised as being a curriculum stripped of stuff high school students learn solely because they'll be tested on it. They could strip it more. I got that sense in Foundations II but wasn't confident enough to call it out; now I'm doing linear algebra stuff and, I mean --- I object on moral grounds to inverting a matrix with determinants!

The flip side though: I have a decent grip on calc now, after just a couple months of doing this rather than crosswords. My trig, another weak spot, is annoyingly better (also I now know I authentically hate trig). The gripes are just gripes; my overall experience is, it does what it says on the tin.

I read people (and reviews, including expert reviews) complain about Math Academy's spartan approach to explanation/exposition/proofs. It's a super fair concern. For my part, I pair Math Academy with GPT; GPT is better than any online math education resource at explaining and handholding. I don't need explanations; what I need is a focused, structured curriculum: do this, then this, here's the problem sets, here's a graded quiz. I know how to read a book already; books didn't teach me any math --- university linear algebra course homework problem sets did. This is a better version of that.

That's a great find, as I'm in a somewhat similar place - (re)-learning maths at a not so young age, with kids, and doing it for the same reasons as the author. There is plenty of material out there for free (including a lot of complete courses from top universities), but not a lot of that is structured and I was often finding myself 'not knowing what I don't know'. Surprisingly, I've found chatGPT quite good for helping in that.

My current method is watching a lot of videos and taking notes - it's great in the beginning when it's mostly rediscovering what I already knew, but anything that's really new - it takes orders of magnitude more time. And that's very hard without some structure in learning.

I'm definitely giving Math Academy a try - looks great for what I need.

I did a summer of khan academy over a decade ago.

I was switching from liberal arts to NLP and wanted to train my math muscle. I went with their “world of Math” which was a feature to go over all math problems “in order”. When stuck you could view the associated video.

I don’t think they have that feature anymore.

As khan Academy goes from preschool through high school, you start out by counting pictures of elephants and other exercises meant for young children to get comfortable with numbers, which was definitely too early a place to start.

I thought it was fun to see how such exercises looked and I didn’t really now how far I wanted to skip so I just powered through.

I think it was really good with the above caveat. My other two cents are: going from way too easy problems to problems you actually have to work on is jarring in terms of pacing. All in all I enjoyed it.

It’s love to know how it compares to MathAcademy. I think Khan Academy is of really high quality and to go from free to $50/month requires a lot of added value.

> It was at the same time depressing (I’m dumb), liberating (I don’t have to pretend I’m not dumb anymore) and exciting (I have a chance to be not dumb anymore).

> Learning is hard work, and if you don’t respect the process, it won’t happen.

These two ideas resonate well with me. My experience in pursuit of steady and sustainable growth in any area of interest has had these in common. You have articulated them well enough for me to realize that. I appreciate that.

I am also at a similar point in life that sits at the intersection of building consistent habits that support goals and balancing priorities like family life. “It’s a marathon, not a sprint” has never been more applicable.

I have tried Math Academy after seeing a post here a few years ago (I think it was to Justin's blog? --- he's referred to early on in TFA).

Echoing what others say: it was very cool, went quickly at first, but within a few weeks, progress slowed because I just couldn't ingest the new information as quickly, even when doing two "blocks" a day.

It is superior to the free tier of Khan Academy.

I don't know if it's superior to textbooks and problem sets in a self-study capacity.

I found it better than the (highly rated) math education I partially received in HS.

I understand such blog spam is yet another plug for another thing where you need to swipe your card at some point for some questionable benefit. At this rate I would have thought that we are able to smell the crap as consumers, but there seems to be enough people who are willing to experiment with that.

For those who really want to "learn math" as autodidacts, nothing comes close to the Open University textbooks that are freely available in your libraries and also with some clever searching online. That material is refined over decades to support the autodidact use case.

I really want to backfill my math one day, so I've slowly collected tools like this for "when I have the time" (scheduled in 2 years lol). I'm unclear why I'd use this tool instead of Khan Academy, which is free and seems to have developed a solid reputation for the like, decade or more its been around.

I’ve never understood why people post daily updates to social media. Who wants to see that?

I really love the free khan academy, https://www.khanacademy.org/

It has some higher level mathematics, but crucially has some lever stuff to make sure your understanding is rock solid.

I'm doing Math academy and learning Mathematica at the same time. I've made the pragmatic decision to do as much with mathematica as possible. This makes learning math vastly more fun and faster.

Claude is pretty good at explaining how to solve problems with and without using Mathematica.

As a kid, I started to get really into computer graphics. But, the textbooks I got as a 15 year old from Borders Books were full of calculus that was literally greek to me. I was also not really enjoying my public school math education. One day I brought the book to my math teacher and he was dismissive and basically said, 'you're not going to understand any of this – it's college and beyond."

Such a giant missed opportunity that makes me more angry now as an adult with my own kids.

In the end, I'm self-taught in so many areas that it means throughout the years I've had to confront gaps and work to fill them in. And there's definitely a healthy amount of 'learn to unlearn' because, sometimes you're lucky enough to find a book or a person who explains things to you in a totally different way that makes it all click.

Anyway – it's never too late; big fan of life-long learning and continual self-improvement.

Reminder for the broke people like me, Khan Academy is free and very good

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