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Given the frequency and popularity of these "math texts for programmer audience" threads on HN, I think there's a solid business model where programmers pay a o
by dxbydt 10y ago
Given the frequency and popularity of these "math texts for programmer audience" threads on HN, I think there's a solid business model where programmers pay a onetime subscription fee for unlimited email/hangouts access to a math professor.
The problem with learning math all by yourself is, to quote my favorite math professor- "math is a foreign language".
So its a bit like trying to learn chinese sitting in a non-chinese setting, with only a chinese grammar text. You are simply not going to get very far. Far easier to buy a plane ticket to China and surround yourself with Chinese speakers, so you learn through osmosis - which is what the university experience is all about. But not everyone can take time off and go to a university. So then, atleast have a Chinese mentor on call, who can guide you through the difficult parts, tell you why things are the way they are etc.
I'd be glad to pay $1000 for a 1year unlimited email access to a math prof who can help me with some of the harder portions of measure theory and Banach spaces. Sign up enough students like myself and you have a lucrative gig.
- math_and_stuff 10y agoAs a former math professor, I'm not confident that this would be as scalable as you might be assuming. Given a nominal fee of $1k/year and a reasonable target of 100 such subscriptions, that is 100 people requesting "unlimited" amounts of your time in 1on1's. And decent 1on1's require non-trivial prep. And, given 100 customers, at least one is bound to push the limits of the "unlimited" premise.
- dxbydt 10y agoThe "unlimited" is mostly branding, like gmail's unlimited email storage. In practice, professionals like myself simply don't have the time to bug you at all hours of the day. I have a dayjob and maybe an hour I could devote to math every weekday. So worst case you'd receive 1 question a day...usually far less. Moreover, students tend to ask the same questions, so after the initial phase you can simply redirect most queries to preexisting URL. Also, you as a professor don't have to chime in for everything - have a graduate student preprocess the majority of the questions and you attack the harder 10%. Its definitely feasible. Chegg does something similar - what's missing is the quality and rankings
- sn9 10y agoOr you could just take a class at a local university or community college. You could contact the professor and see if they're okay with you auditing and using office hours and the like without paying or you could contact the university and see if you can pay to take a class without enrolling in a degree program.