Could people recommend resources to help my wife learn more complicated mathematics? She had a really terrible maths education, and while she essentially OK with every day maths she keeps wanting to know more about topics that would be college and university level.
She often wants to dig much deeper into a subject than basic texts allow, but there are some fundamentals that she has never been taught, which means there is quite a lot of going back to basics needed.
I can find a lot of resources for remedial mathematics that are aimed at basic numeracy, but the questions she wants to ask are things like: What is set theory(which led us into questions on what numbers mean, and Peano axioms), How does cryptography work? What are imaginary numbers? Various stats problems.
I've got a maths and comp sci degree so I usually know what the answer is, but there is such a void of knowledge between us, we can spend hours getting deeper and deeper trying to resolve a side issue from the main question, and it can get frustrating for both of us. 🙂
General resources would be great, or advice on how best to approach it. Specific resources about Crypto, number/set theory, and Statistics would also be appreciated.
Best Answer
Here's my advice: Work through each of the texts listed below. By "work through", I mean understand all proofs and do most of the exercises. This will bring her up to speed with roughly the average junior math major at the average US college. Note that prerequisites parenthesis.