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You spend a non-trivial amount of time learning calculus, for example, but how do you maintain that competency?

HiroshiSan 8y ago
maybe you could compile a list of problems and use anki to regularly train yourself? There's also Schaums outline for Calculus You can also try going through Art of Problem Solving Calculus (though it's much more difficult than the typical calculus text)
- geezerjay 8y ago
  > maybe you could compile a list of problems and use anki to regularly train yourself? That seems to favour rote learning instead of actually developing or keeping core competences.
  - mindcrime 8y ago
    Given that the OP has already learned the material and is mainly interested in retention, that shouldn't be a problem. In my experience, it's the mechanical stuff that you forget most quickly without use, as opposed to the conceptual stuff.
arandr0x 8y ago
Which competency in calculus do you find hard to maintain, exactly? My job does require math, but only occasionally calculus (and even then we don't integrate anything by hand, there's Wolfram Alpha for this stuff). If you can't remember the core intuitions about calculus (what does integrating a function mean, how to use the derivative or gradient to find local minima or maxima, which functions are continuous, which of those are derivable everywhere) then if you're like me and most people I know, you need to spend more time applying calculus. You can read stuff in fields that benefit from application of calculus to get a better feel for it (geometry if you're doing anything with curves or curved surfaces; computational geometry is also quite fun, also in most engineering fields there is some calculus to model the application of the forces, if you like building things learning to simulate real-world structures and systems can be super motivating). Build a (very small) neural network without a framework, that'll make you work at grasping the concepts of measuring small variations in the output of a function in a way that is very goal-directed. (I used your example of calculus because I think you're talking about being an adult with a day job who can't find a use for high school math. If you did math in university and are worried about losing your skill at writing proofs, you should find a job writing proofs. There is about zero overlap between proof writing and a developer career, and proof writing is tedious and difficult to gain the focus to do on the side.)

maybe you could compile a list of problems and use anki to regularly train yourself? There's also Schaums outline for Calculus You can also try going through Art of Problem Solving Calculus (though it's much more difficult than the typical calculus text)

geezerjay 8y ago
> maybe you could compile a list of problems and use anki to regularly train yourself? That seems to favour rote learning instead of actually developing or keeping core competences.
- mindcrime 8y ago
  Given that the OP has already learned the material and is mainly interested in retention, that shouldn't be a problem. In my experience, it's the mechanical stuff that you forget most quickly without use, as opposed to the conceptual stuff.

arandr0x 8y ago

Which competency in calculus do you find hard to maintain, exactly? My job does require math, but only occasionally calculus (and even then we don't integrate anything by hand, there's Wolfram Alpha for this stuff). If you can't remember the core intuitions about calculus (what does integrating a function mean, how to use the derivative or gradient to find local minima or maxima, which functions are continuous, which of those are derivable everywhere) then if you're like me and most people I know, you need to spend more time applying calculus. You can read stuff in fields that benefit from application of calculus to get a better feel for it (geometry if you're doing anything with curves or curved surfaces; computational geometry is also quite fun, also in most engineering fields there is some calculus to model the application of the forces, if you like building things learning to simulate real-world structures and systems can be super motivating). Build a (very small) neural network without a framework, that'll make you work at grasping the concepts of measuring small variations in the output of a function in a way that is very goal-directed. (I used your example of calculus because I think you're talking about being an adult with a day job who can't find a use for high school math. If you did math in university and are worried about losing your skill at writing proofs, you should find a job writing proofs. There is about zero overlap between proof writing and a developer career, and proof writing is tedious and difficult to gain the focus to do on the side.)