Starting math from zero (on purpose, at 20-something)

Confession: I build things for a living and my math is embarrassing. Not “rusty” — actually thin in the foundations. I want to fix it, in public, so I can’t quietly give up.

Why bother

I don’t need calculus to ship a CRUD app. But I keep hitting ceilings:

1. Reasoning about complexity beyond “loops bad.”
2. Anything probabilistic — and half of working with LLMs is probability.
3. The quiet feeling that there’s a whole layer I’m guessing my way around.

The plan

Small and boring on purpose, because ambitious plans are how I quit:

• 20 minutes a day, not 3 hours on Sundays.
• Rebuild the base first: fractions, algebra, functions. No skipping to the cool stuff.
• Write one Vault note per concept that finally clicks, in my own words.

If a concept can’t survive me explaining it here plainly, I don’t actually understand it yet. That’s the test.

First up whenever I get to it: why O(log n) shows up everywhere once you start halving things.