This book seems to start where you need it to start.
You don't need much beyond basic calculus. Most suffer from some mental block they got installed at a young age akin those that say "I'm bad at math" because their teacher sucked. Dive in and you won't regret it.
I have been a math teacher and although I can't guarantee that I didn't suck, I can say that most of kids don't develop this attitude because of teachers, but because of their parents. "My mum says that she sucked at math/music/whatever as well, so do I!" is far too common. As a teacher I just didn't have resources to influence this attitude either.
Yes, parents can be horrible too.
Unfortunately it's somehow socially acceptable and even worthy of pride in some circles, to be "bad at math". It's seems very rare for someone to openly say "I'm bad at [my native language]" or "writing".
I feel stats is has a somewhat similar effect even among those with math education. Several friends who have a degree in math recoil at the first mention of stats concepts.
> It's seems very rare for someone to openly say "I'm bad at [my native language]" or "writing".
It is actually even fashionable in non-english countries. Declaring "I'm bad at [my native language], I only use english anyway" makes you a better person somehow. And it's not rare in other areas either – in post-truth world it's trendy not to know things.
I didn't mean that in all of them and everyone in any of them. But it has been always the case everywhere in the world. It's the mechanism how languages die - gravitation to the bigger languages. Hundreds of languages die in Russia not only because of limited education in regional languages, but because it's more fashionable to be russian than representative of smaller nation. In world level this gravitation is towards english mainly.
In my country it's especially fashionable not to know a native language for a people in tech. "It's impossible to talk about tech anyway in native languages, so we all should use english anyway in future" is very common. I tried to fight with it localizing/translating software for many years, but I've given up for now.
Not OP, but I recently had a manager in Germany (I'm in the US) say something like that.
Not that he was bad at German, necessarily, but that it was overly complex vs English, so he and his significant other even used English at home when they both didn't have to.
This is just one example, of course.
I was actually surprised to hear him say that (though it may have been to thwart my attempts at speaking some German when we had a meeting. I don't know any German,lol).
My mental block is a brain injury that went undiagnosed until I was 30. I can't really hold more than two numbers in my head at a time. I struggled through math in school because it was lecture based, and the books were written to accompany a lecture.
I can learn math fairly well if I have the right written material and the right direction. However, I do not retain math skills: without active practice, I revert back to "how do fractions work?"
For example, I did extremely well in a college algebra course that was partially online (combined with Khan Academy to catch up). I could do my tests perfectly in pen, much to the amusement of the assistants. I could make connections and see the implications and applications of the math. Roughly three to six months later, I was back to forgetting fractions.
I can't learn these things over time, but I can learn them all at once. I'm collecting resources for my next math adventure.
Yes. What would you like to know? I am better at answering specific questions.
The injury was diagnosed via SPECT scan. Two of them: one after mental activity, one after physical relaxation. This also revealed that my brain relaxes with mental activity, and "lights up" with physical relaxation.
No, I don't know how. The clinic also took a medical history and said, based on my symptoms, it probably happened in early childhood as a baby.
I always knew there was "something" wrong with me, so I jumped at the opportunity to get a brain scan. The clinic was a little suspect in that they claimed to be able to diagnose mental health issues via the scan, but they combined the scan with more traditional evaluations.
Of which many that don't make it because they've had some early bad experience rather than actually being unable to. And there is a parallel for those with some basic mastery of algebra and calculus and have some mental block towards stats.
You don't need much beyond basic calculus. Most suffer from some mental block they got installed at a young age akin those that say "I'm bad at math" because their teacher sucked. Dive in and you won't regret it.