About my study of math

[Edward K. Ream]

This post discusses my recent transition to studying mathematics full-time, whatever that means :-)

tl;dr: math.leo, in the EKR-Math repo, contains most of my mathematical work.

A brief history

The transition began approximately December 5, the day I released Leo 6.8.3. Progress has been faster than expected. My energy has varied between high and extremely high!

Guiding all study is Steve Brunton's course, ME 564. The real work involves mastering all the exercises. There are no shortcuts. I'll take as long as necessary to relearn all the prerequisites.

Tools

The Khan Academy helps me brush up on topics I last studied 55 years ago.

The superb Overleaf website converts LaTeX input to beautiful typeset results. Each exercise in the ME 564 will get a separate worksheet. It's been a ton of fun relearning LaTeX. Overleaf is the math notebook of my dreams.

I use Mathway as an algebraic calculator. I may investigate various competitors as the need arises.

Infrastructure and workflow

Using math.leo and creating the EKR-Math repo seem natural in retrospect, but it took a while to see how effective this workflow is.

The script that converts Jupyter Notebooks to Python files was a crucial innovation. That script allowed me to use Leo instead of Jupyter. Later, I realized that Leo's outlines are way better than Jupyter Notebooks for organizing all my math-related programs and data.

It is amazingly easy to run pyplot scripts from Leo. The execute-script command just works! I still have lots to learn about Matplotlib, but that can wait for now.

Yesterday, I wrote a straightforward script that calls pdflatex directly from Leo. It's in math.leo if you are interested. The idea was to typeset LaTeX directly from Leo. However, a few minutes of experimentation showed that Overleaf was more convenient. Still, the script might come in handy someday.

Summary

math.leo demonstrates a natural workflow for studying mathematics and recording all results. The surprising conclusion is that Leo is a much better foundation than either MatLab or Jupyter.

Now it's time to switch focus from infrastructure and workflow to actual study. I am comfortable with the web's resources and am eager to dive deeply into engineering mathematics.

My latest mental trick is to pretend I'm a super-bright 12-year-old. I'm way ahead of my peers and am eager to learn as much college engineering math as I can before high school :-) All my good work habits will support my studies.

Edward