500 Days of Math

Summary

I recently crossed 500 days of practicing math daily with Math Academy. I wrote about my experience after 100 days here. TL;DR: I am still very impressed by the Math Academy system and highly recommend it, but you get out of it what you put in. My consistency has been exceptional, but my volume has been frequently low, which has had a cascading impact on my progress. To help, I spent January and February building a habit app to help improve my volume along with some other changes in how I handle my habits. All that said, despite my best efforts to sabotage myself, I’m amazed at how much I’ve improved and at my fledgling superpowers. I didn’t even know what derivatives or integrals were, let alone what the symbols meant. I still have a long way to go, but I’m more determined than ever. Why I started From the initial 100 day post: “I’ve worked on various AI products over the last year and like understanding the technical aspects of the products I build. But as I dug in to learn more about how large language models (LLMs) and transformers worked…I was lost. It was humbling.” A friend had been building a math education app called Math Academy for most of the last decade, so this finally gave me an excuse to try it and support him as I do with most of my friends’ products. But before we get into how it’s going, I’d like to confess talk about where I was starting from, which was even worse than I thought. The gap When I wrote the first post, I knew I’d have a long way to go, but I somehow still underestimated how far behind I was. Growing up, a lot of things came easy to me, so I rarely studied. I could just absorb it in class and mostly get A’s. But when things started getting harder, I just avoided it. “Oh, this honors math class means I need to work harder and study? No thanks, I’d rather play EverQuest/StarCraft/World of Warcraft.” I started skipping the hard stuff since past a certain point it was all optional. I did the same thing in college. I majored in Psychology...