A Mind for Numbers
The companion book to COURSERA®'s wildly popular massive open online course "Learning How to Learn" Whether you are a student struggling to fulfill a math or science requirement, or you are embarking on a career change that requires a new skill set, A Mind for Numbers offers the tools you need to get a better grasp of that intimidating material. Engineering professor Barbara Oakley knows firsthand how it feels to struggle with math. She flunked her way through high school math and science courses, before enlisting in the army immediately after graduation. When she saw how her lack of mathematical and technical savvy severely limited her options—both to rise in the military and to explore other careers—she returned to school with a newfound determination to re-tool her brain to master the very subjects that had given her so much trouble throughout her entire life. In A Mind for Numbers, Dr. Oakley lets us in on the secrets to learning effectively—secrets that even dedicated and successful students wish they’d known earlier. Contrary to popular belief, math requires creative, as well as analytical, thinking. Most people think that there’s only one way to do a problem, when in actuality, there are often a number of different solutions—you just need the creativity to see them. For example, there are more than three hundred different known proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem.
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57recommend
91mentions
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2014–2025years
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What Hacker News says
- I recently read and enjoyed "A Mind for Numbers" by Barbara Oakley, full of lots of techniques for learning maths and science
- > A lot of people hate rote learning - but elementary math classes, meaning all the way up to calculus (or prior to more rigorous proof based classes), do require a bunch of memorization
A lot of people still think reading and re-reading textbooks is the way to memorise theorems but recall (attempting to remember them without the book) is much better.
I cannot recommend the book "A Mind for Numbers" by Barbara Oakley enough - it put me on a journey to re-learning Maths as an adult.
- Quite dissapointing, because I found the authors book "A Mind For Numbers" to be good.
- I started reading the article and it reminded me of a great book I read, A Mind For Numbers.
Then I realized it was the same author!
Definitely worth reading if you've been avoiding deepening your math understanding.
- My top recommendations for understanding and improving how you learn are the Coursera course Learning how to Learn and the accompanying book, A Mind for Numbers. Absolute game changers for me, and many years later I continue to practice and leverage what I learned from them.
https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn
https://books.google.com/books/about/A_Mind_for_Numbers.html...
- Seconded. On this, I think the book "A Mind for Numbers" by Barbara Oakley summed up the lessons when it comes to learning the best. The effort/struggle to learn a topic is a signal to the brain that this particular information is salient and worth remembering; like some sort of feedback/anchor. People more should reframe and be thinking on how should they approach a subject to make getting to "the click" and understanding faster (not necessarily easier).
