I've learned a fair bit of python, c, and elisp. I don't know as much math as I'd like to. It's been my experience learning math in school that a lot of the time is occupied by paper and pencil. To avoid wasting time writing stuff out I'd like to use a computer to learn math.
So here's my question:
1. Is it feasible; am I likely to learn faster by using a computer to try and explore the problem domains without having to use a pencil?
2. If it'll work, how should I go about it? Latex, mathematica, any textbooks oriented towards working with math w/o pencil & paper, anybody who's learned math in the way I suggest?
Project Euler is a fun way to motivate yourself to learn some algorithms, number theory, and a few other math topics, by solving programming puzzles: <a href="http://projecteuler.net/" rel="nofollow">http://projecteuler.net/</a><p>O'Reilly's <i>Statistics in a Nutshell</i> is a good stats textbook and reference, has some good exercises to be done in R (or S or Matlab), and is generally more programming-oriented than most statistics treatments. <a href="http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510497/" rel="nofollow">http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510497/</a><p>Two important classics are Knuth's <i>The Art of Computer Programming</i> (more algorithms/programming-focused; very steep learning curve) and <i>Concrete Mathematics</i> (with Ron Graham and Oren Patashnik; more math-focused; may be easier for self-study). Both have exercises you can work through, though many of the exercises are proofs (not easily translatable to programming).