I'm working on an open source guide to exactly this, but it needs more peer review: https://github.com/EternityForest/AnyoneCanDoIt/blob/master/MathELI5.md http

I'm working on an open source guide to exactly this, but it needs more peer review: https://github.com/EternityForest/AnyoneCanDoIt/blob/master/MathELI5.md https://github.com/EternityForest/AnyoneCanDoIt/blob/master/... It's not actually a guide to learning math, it's a primer on what math does, how it's used and where, how it fits into culture, and how you can get by if you don't actually understand it, and why it's worth it to actually learn. I don't actually have any understanding of math fundamentals at all myself, so there's nothing that would confuse an outsider, and all the stuff that math people fins obvious but I had to go spend a day searching for is there. All the interesting stuff in math seems to be continuous and recursive and not at it's core, with multiple parts that touch each other at once. Math people will tell you that it's like programming, and everything decomposes to simple steps, and you just need to memorize some rules. They will also tell you that they like math because it teaches you "a whole new way of thinking". It's a "Draw the rest of the owl" problem. Their idea of a "small simple step" is completely incomprehensible to those without the "new way of thinking". Which you apparently learn by starting at the bottom, but you can't make any direct practical use of it till you really understand it. Basic algebra doesn't unlock any new abilities you didn't have before, by using a CAS solver. It lets you learn slightly less basic algebra, and THEN you can do something that isn't already a solved problem. But since there's the legendary "new way of thinking", an outsider can't actually imagine how it's going to help them, just like I can't imagine what it's like to juggle three balls or drive a car, they're just... impossibilities I know nothing of. I think people give up on math partly because only the next few steps are visible, the whole road to being able to do a Kalman filter is not. There's absolutely no instant gratification for a beginner not polluted by a sense of "A calculator could do that", so only the talented, or the disciplined usually learn it. I've always had extreme trouble with things that are spatial, have multiple interacting parts, have abstractions beyond what we can describe in words easily, etc, so I can't help you actually learn the math itself, because... I'm still working on learning the very basic stuff. But I think I have a fairly accurate record of what math is from a black box perspective, and how it works from a sociological perspective, and why people hate it and quit before they actually learn.