Around early 2016, I decided to learn math. The impetus was a comment on reddit about a guy who struggled with math being able to master it with proofs. The idea that I could learn math after years of struggling with it (only to end up somewhat above average) was a revelation. If I knew math I could do so many things! I could apply it to biology (which I had a strong handle on) in various creative ways and do so much science!
Sadly, I didn't realize the ride I was in for. With all my naivete I jumped into the deep end. I bought a book on stochastic methods (lol). It fell to the wayside a few pages in, and I got busy finishing up end of grad school stuff.
I finished grad school and went onto to do a postdoc with 2 PIs - a physicist and a biologist. This is when I started my math journey in earnest. My physicist boss (PB) asked me to learn linear algebra. He recommended Strang. I also found 3b1b and watched the entire series. My understanding was very coarse-grained. When asked what a null space was, I said "The vectors which send matrices to zero" instead of the other way around. That was really embarrassing to admit, by the way. This ended up being a theme in my early mathematical years. I chased intuition before rigor. I'm still not certain that wasn't the right thing to do.
Jumping ahead a few years, I had moved to back to India. I decided "enough is enough" and found a local tutor to teach me. She said she could comfortably teach me calculus. I said, sure even though I had learnt it before in high school and college. We went over everything someone studying for the IIT exams would need. It wasn't enough. For some reason, I wanted to do group theory (without learning linear algebra!). I could find nobody equipped to teach me. Then I tried deriving the Boltzman's equation and got stuck with what happened to the constant. I didn't realize I could just swallow the constant in. At this point we are in 2022. I binge watched math lectures like they were my salvation. But everyone knows that passive listening only gets you so far in math.
Then two huge things happen at once: I start a second postdoc at TIFR in Mumbai, and an old school friend comes back into my life. This friend did a lot of physics in grad school. He knew all about group theory - I asked:) Better yet, he was happy to teach me. So began our lessons, and my new postdoc. Both progressed at a steady clip. F taught me to slow down, explained everything I needed at my level and in general was the most patient person I had met. I watched all of Strang's linear algebra lectures. I bought Schuam's solved problems in Linear algebra and solved problems on there and finally got the hang of it. I wanted to learn probability and statistics, and some of the professors at TIFR suggested a few books and online lectures for it. I watched all of them and got the hang of it (more or less).
I watched the Ramanujan movie and decided I wanted to learn number theory. A professor of number theory I knew from IISc suggested I work through Silverman's "A Friendly Introduction to Number Theory". This was brilliant advice. I worked through several problems and found the subject really hard and abstract. Given that my ability to go abstract is something I'm proud of, this was a humbling experience. I'm still working through it.
Today I have a good amount of linear algebra, probability and stats, under my belt, as well as miscellaneous topics here and there. A decade in that's not the best showing. But slow progress is better than no progress.
So I continue.
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