Hello World, of DIY-Math

[Jubal E.]

Hi everybody,

I was an undergrad philosophy major at a state university until this
school year (I dropped out because tuition was too expensive and my
classes were, to me, remedial, I knew more than most of my teachers).
I never really liked math in HS, only got to precalc, but then took
logic at the U and realized that I just didnt get math when it was
presented without the full picture of why it works (I'm a big picture
kind of guy). That said I am teaching myself IT and programming skills
so I can take certification tests, in place of going to school. I am
really interested in works in data analysis, predictive analytics, and
AI, so as far as math goes I've gotten into systems/network theory,
and complexity. So far I have been using lesswrong.org, the math for
primates podcast, wikipedia, and reading Godel, Escher, Bach by
Douglas Hofstadter, and finished Nexus, a book on small worlds theory
from 2000ish, about a month ago. I am an extremely motivated
autodidact, if youve got a question about philosophy and/or economics
I can probably answer it, tell you the history and what the new
developments are (if not we can find out together, yay internets), and
my interest in math is how it relates both to metaphysics and ethical
calculus (theories of utility and the like), and economics (game
theory, complexity, probability), my knowledge of math is broad, but
shallow, so I am excited to take this course and learn a lot and share
with everyone because DIY is basically my core ethic.

Hope everyone is having a good day, nice to meet you all,

Jubal E.

P.S. Not my real name, Jubal is homage to Robert Heinlein's character
in Stranger in a Strange Land, and the E stands for Enso, the zen
circle

[jonsul]

I agree with you. I posted about how I can't learn with the curtain
teachers hold
in front of why and how something works. I need a big picture too to
fully understand
something. Which is why I'm good at programming, all i have to do is
look up a
good reference and I have it all in front of me. I guess I'm hoping to
learn math
as a language and then knowing the syntax be able to know what's going
on
and how to use it. But i'm afraid that it may not be possible :/
It's pretty neat to see someone on here with similar interests. I'm
huge into
philosophy and think I may focus on it. Which is part of why I want to
learn
math more because I have a little pet theory on everything and want to
see
if there's any founding in it. I've taught myself every programming
language
I know. JavaScript, Python, HTML/CSS, SQL, CL/Scheme all of it I
taught
myself. I'm big into AI to, me and a friend have some interesting
projects going
on building normal apps as AI's.

Good luck on the course. If you want a math buddy for it I'm good for
it.

[Joe Corneli]

Another idea would be to take programming as a starting point,
that's what I'm planning to do (i.e. start with the program JAGS
and see what mathematics I'll need to know to figure out how to
use it, looking at supporting texts when necessary). If it's any
encouragement, math and programming are really the same :).

It's a bit heavy going but here's a paper that describes why:
http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/frege/frege.pdf
might be fun to flip through.

[Jubal E.]

Sounds good. My programming experience is pretty shallow, i know
(x)HTML(5) and CSS(3), took a semester of java, and one of my current
goals is to teach myself PHP and Ruby on Rails, but I decided I need
to get a better understanding of Logic and discrete math to make sure
that i dont teach myself bad programming habits. I'd be really
interested in your AI projects. If I take your meaning right you mean
integrating AI into normal apps like note taking or web browsing? Have
you heard of Diaspora? I'm really interested in getting involved with
the project and building an AI plugin that uses recommendation
algorithms and some semantic recognition tech with something like a
wiki so you can use it as a note taking and collaborative tool that
will be able to look up its own contents and keep track of how its
changed. I dont know if that makes any sense really, but I want
something that makes it easy to manage a lot of information because
I'm working on a book of philosophy and want a way to logically
connect my notes and represent them in nonlingual ways. Hence my
interest in learning discrete math and algorithms.

[Joe Corneli]

Yowsa... sounds a lot like some of my projects both current and
temporarily stalled (Gravpad, Arxana). I'd love to talk about these
things with you more sometime... but for the purposes of this
course, let's try to home in on the *mathematical aspects* of
such things.

At the same time, I can imagine just about *any* kind of math
becoming relevant to hypertext, eventually. But really good to
have the math and programming skills to effect the translation.
It could be fun to code up demos based on ideas/exercises
from Concrete Mathematics ??