There is an ambiguity in your question. Do you want to learn mathematical techniques or do you wish to learn mathematics? If it is the former, Badger's comment has some good recommendations. If it is the latter, then you just need to examine the patterns that interest you. There is an unfortunate gap between courses in mathematical techniques and the process of mathematics.

While there are many ways of approaching mathematics. I am a big fan of asking "why" of every assumption. Why must the pattern be like this? What happens if it is NOT like this? This method is great practice for identifying conclusions.

There is a more fundamental flaw in maths eduction than calculus vs, statistics. Very few people come out of school knowing what a maths problem is. If you ask most people to identify a maths problem, they will point to the exercises in a book or a work sheet. Very, very few will point to the world or their experiences. There is no place in the current curriculum that shows people how to frame a question about the world in a way that maths can be applied. Neither calculus or statistics is useful if you don't know how to frame the problem in the first place.

Hmm, so to be attack-resistant you'd need:

• at least one karma point to post in discussion
• at least one karma point before you can vote at all
• admins to look for accounts that are used to upvote spam accounts

If I was a seller, I would never use what you term the "best possible mechanism". This notion of mechanism design, and more generally of rational play, is certainly interesting mathematics, but in practice it often leads to mechanisms that consistently perform very badly (sometimes it gives good mechanisms, but that is no thanks to the formalism). I don't think the revelation principle really has much to say about practical mechanisms. I'm not arguing that mechanism design shouldn't be approached theoretically; I'm just saying that you might use a different model if you re-examined the maxim "rational play ends at a Nash equilibrium" and its justification.

I make my money teaching/ tutoring. This has the wonderful benefit of requiring me to re-familiarize myself with a wide range of topics and giving me a reason to study. Particularly wonderful as i have a hard time sticking with a topic without a reason.

I think that this is something that many LWers could benefit from.

Grey markets?

Hello

I've only been aware of this site for about a month. While i find the articles and discussions enlightening, probability theory is still very new to me. Once i have a more intuitive grasp of its implications I plan to participate more heavily