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A Mind For Numbers: How To Excel At Math And Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra) (2014)

by Barbara Oakley(Favorite Author)

4.17 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

039916524X (ISBN13: 9780399165245)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Tarcher

review 1: A Mind for Numbers (2014) by Barbara Oakley is a book on how to study and more particularly how to study math. It's adapted from a course on how to learn to learn.Oakley did poorly at math in high school, stopped doing it and joined the army where she became a Russian translator. There she learned how to learn. After being in the Signal Core she decided she wanted to learn how the systems she was using worked so she got an Electrical Engineering degree and used her improved learning skills to learn math, which had eluded her previously and she went on to get a PhD.The looks at how to get an overview, create chunks of knowledge and revise them so that they become embedded in your mind in a framework that enables you to keep the knowledge and understand math. Working through... more math in periods of focussed time and then relaxing and using diffuse thinking to get to more creative solutions is carefully described. It's a well written, carefully constructed book that would have been a great help to me when studying. The book is full of anecdotes of people who have overcome study difficulties and learnt material deeply. It's very much worth reading.
review 2: Oakley begins by describing a childhood story of how she flunked at school in Mathematics and Sciences, but goes on to become a professor of engineering, where she has to employ Maths in her daily job.Given the dysfunctional educational system in which kids are forced to stress more on understanding the material, they often end up cramming the subject leading to improper digestion which comes back to bite them in the adulthood, i.e. they have to revise these materials. Oakley's book shows how to remedy those mistakes in re-learning those materials.But, the central crown in this book is a solid narrative on how the human brain assimilates the learning and how it can retain it for longer periods in the long-term memory by making use of chunking of information aided by repetition, practise and recalling the material systematically. Finally, there are many anecdotes and pointers as to how celebrated scientists and successful people were able to pioneer such thoughts that led to landmark discoveries.In a nutshell, this ranks as one of the best books that I have read in the recent times that is so simple, intuitive and delivers a compelling narrative backed by years of scientific research into the human memory. less

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