Probably it's just another advice-seeking CS student about math.. Well. I have math anxiety. Im a CS student, back then in undergrad I deal with code everyday, as long as my program work smoothly, i'm fine. I graduated with cumlaude honor in my undergrad school. I can say I'm pretty good with my coding skill. Now that I get into grad school (master), everything needs fundamental motivation, reasoning.. and a lot of math.
I'm always afraid of math, and never really good at numbers, can't remember formulas, brains so slow at processing equation. Especially when someone's watching me, I kind of revert back to kindergarten stage. I even failed a simple matrix multiplication when my prof was watching me did it on the white board, I was so devastated, it was just matrix multiplication ! I felt like a failure to the point that I cried when I got back home. Whenever I read papers and it comes to method section with a lot of equations, I got very nervous, I'm not even exaggerating.
I tried to talk to people I trust about this problem, and turn out this is a phobia, they call it math anxiety. I wish I had known sooner so I could do something about it, I thought I was just stupid. Also, I came from a country when math is "God", you're a good kid if you're smart at math. So I was called stupid for a while back then.. which I think makes my anxiety even worse. Good point, I continued college, and even grad school so no one call me stupid again. I was a teaching assistant in several coding courses in undergrad, even my juniors told me they understand a lot from my course explanation, I'm good at presentation, demo program, anything .. i'm just so bad, at math.
But I want to change. I want to learn math again. I read article about "How to Science" and how math is in everyday life. I really want to continue PhD, but the future idea that I will deal with a lot of math stuff always fright me out. I also read What methods successfully identify and eliminate severe math anxiety? and How to overcome mathematics-related anxiety? and I got several ideas and book suggestion from the answer
What I've been doing :
- Study from Khan Academy (this will be to basic for grad school level, but I feel that I need to start all over).
- Study from Daniel Shiffman channel on youtube. He's a professor and programmer. And sometimes in his coding he's using math, and he's very good at explaining stuff, even I can understand his math better than what my college professor taught me.
I will need to deal with computational logic, and artificial intelligence that requires a lot of math. I need some advice for my future PhD plan : either is there anyway we can actually continue PhD with minimum math ability ? or, I'll try to be real here, I read here, that's it's too late to learn math when you're already in Grad School. Do you think I should just go, and continue and improve on aspects that I'm already good at (like, coding) ? or do you think no matter what I still need the fundamental understanding about math ? Thank you.