Does anyone have any stories on how they sucked at math and now they're an expert and understand it?

Too tired for the long version, so here's the short;

Had Ds and Fs up until last year of High School. I never paid attention in class, never listened, never learned because of a huge demotivation since elementary school. Even made a (really boring) apprenticeship before starting High School. You can have the highest IQ possible but you cannot get grades from zero information.

However, realized wanted to study Computer Science (and also the teacher in the last year meant really well and we had Probability and Derivatives / Integrals which were the first things that you could literally draw and had really cool RL applications).

So I got my ass up and re-learned everything. Google, YouTube, Khan Academy were my homes until late into the night. Never felt more proud to 100% something more than Khan Academy (and keep coming back because they add new stuff and I don't want to loose my 100%).

First year of University was rough but I kept at it and good A grades in Real Analysis, Linear Algebra and Discrete Mathematics. Nowadays, I can't get enough of it.

This story doesn't involve a huge time investment into learning to program well and my current goal to get to at least AP level Physics in my free time so I have a basic understanding of the universe (already did some little projects like a trivial particle simulator which is nice).

I think the most important point is that in the past, just 20 years earlier? I would never have learned Mathematics, Physics and Programming. I'd be hard sciences and engineering illiterate. This all was only possible thanks to the vast ressources the internet provides for free and for everyone, you just need to insert the right queries into google and get going.

/r/math Thread