15.Feb.2010 The story so far…

Unfortunately I have started this blog after my maths tuition began. I hope to keep more detailed notes up here in the future. For now a brief overview will have to suffice.

The first few sessions I have had with my Dad have been about identifying and patching up the holes in my Maths knowledge from school. I was missing some basic foundation stones of algebra and have begun to address them.

We are working from two books, the first adequatley written, the second, less than adequately written but with a relevant syllabus. The books in question are ‘Foundation Maths’ By Anthony Croft and Robert Davison (Fourth edition) and the second is ‘Beginning Math and Physics for Game Programmers’ by Wendy Stahler. Croft and Davison write well enough for me to understand unaided, although as you might expect, I have come across sections where my questions on a topic are left unanswered.  Stahler’s offering on the other hand, frequently uses untranslated terminology and makes assumptions of her reader that in my case at least make it more difficult to progress through the book without assistance from another source. Luckily, that’s where my Dad comes in to the rescue.

So far, the topics we have covered are:

Simplifying algebraic equations.
Transposing formulae.
Simultaneous equations.
The straight line.