I recently decided to start learning maths again. I stopped it after my penultimate year of secondary school because I found it such a joyless subject. I rememb

I recently decided to start learning maths again. I stopped it after my penultimate year of secondary school because I found it such a joyless subject. I remember friends from the 'advanced maths' class lording it over me saying they were doing 'matrices' (no idea what they were) and 'second order differentiation' (differentiation was hard enough, so that must be way too tough, right?). I figure i've really only missed out on a couple years of math education compared to the people I know who I consider 'good' at maths. And to my advantage I did do some statistics at university. With all the improved learning materials available to me, plus an alliance with programming, and my improved bullshit-detector for bad teaching and studying practices, it should be a breeze to catch up. One problem I still have though is that maths just gets so incredibly boring... at least classes do. I used iTunes U and Khan Academy to study calculus and linear algebra. I had to start skipping past some of the really mechanical parts, because as the article said, as a programmer you just think 'put that in a function and never worry about it again.' Breadth not depth is definitely what I'm after, although I do worry that it's the equivalent of being a musician who knows lots of diverse harmonic theories but still hasn't mastered some scales that would let him/her jam with other musicians.