999/3 days of the Handbook of Mathematics and Computational Science

Goal

I will start at page one of Handbook of Mathematics and Computational Science and work my way through. This book is 999 pages long. My goal is to try to learn something from each page, at a rate of about 20 pages per week. I will blog about things that I learn in the book, or things that are confusing.

Background

Specifically, I am blogging about math as someone who programs in PHP for the web. I have no advanced math or computer training. Instead, I learned what I needed to, like many people, from random combinations of experience, web tutorials, a class or two here and there, learning from others, conferences.

I am revisiting 'math' again because it is the foundation of computer science and knowing nothing about 'real math' is probably not helping me. No one seems to be able to give me advice about this, so I am hopeful that reading a book that covers all of math should allow me to speak about which parts of math actually are going to be helpful for the average web programmer.

Math experience

I had the normal course of math education available to students in public schools in the 80's-90's. I would do my homework, get good grades. I liked all the puzzles.

My college barely had math, and we were barely required to take any math. I studied up to calculus and then stopped for good.

After starting to read HMCS, I can say that some of the math that related to computers already is familiar to me, just from years of experience working with computers. It is sort of like how if you study photography after working with Photoshop, the concepts might not be totally foreign. The concepts of photography are embedded in the design of Photoshop. The same, perhaps with math and computers.