How Do You Learn Math Fast?

Join me as I try to find out.

The single most powerful factor in learning mathematics isn’t IQ but knowing how to learn. I’ve studied and taught mathematics at the graduate level for years, and I can tell you from experience that a slow thinker with consistent work ethic will beat a fast thinker with poor technique every day of the week. Everywhere I look I see people struggling with this. It’s not a lack of curiosity or ambition but a lack of guidance. The knowledge of how to learn effectively is out there, but it’s scattered across niche books and specialized corners of academia that few people ever encounter.

That gap matters because without the ability to teach yourself you’re always stuck depending on someone else, a class, a video, or a tutorial, to break things down for you. That dependency can take you part of the way, but it leaves you unable to chart your own course. The challenge isn’t just how to learn highly mathematical subjects like statistics or machine learning or AI. The challenge is how to learn anything difficult, and how to learn mathematics in particular.

I know how I’ve done it, but I don’t know if my way is best. Moreover, there are very likely lots of things I do that I’m not even conscious of doing. So I’m starting a project to read a stack of books on learning, to test what they say against my own experience, and to report what I find here. The first book, which I’ve already started, is How to Study as a Mathematics Major, which examines the very specific ways studying mathematics at the college level differs from other subjects. I’ll be making notes as I go and sharing those insights here, so the principles of learning mathematics can become clearer not just for me but for anyone else who wants to learn them.

Look out for new articles starting this week.