Studying Math... For Fun???

I am studying math for fun... What the hell happened to turn me into a math nerd at this stage of adulthood?

Electing to study math makes me feel on the level with Database, Matt Groening's least favorite Simpsons character.

When I was small, math was among my favorite subjects, but near the end of elementary school an unstable home environment was causing my grades to slip, and the subject I once loved was finally ruined for me in the eighth grade by a bad teacher, who set me and the rest of his classes behind the grade, and robbed me of my enjoyment of mathematics for a very long time.

Recently, an appreciation of math has grown on me again, however, and I've taken it upon myself to study more.

A few forces are driving me. The ICS program at UH revealed my weaknesses in math all over again, but it also forced a good dose of mathematical learning on me, and my humble successes there (I passed!) gave me the taste for it once more. The wide range of discrete maths subjects--set theory! combinatorics! formal logic!--makes mathematics look much less dull than the sequential drudgery of HS math curricula, and the good teaching in the department made math(s) less a scary subject(s). Further motivation comes from one of my favorite professors, Henri Casanova, who persuaded me that learning more math would be the fastest, most effective way to improve as a programmer. Conveniently, nowadays there are lots of online classes available to the autodidactically inclined.

So, I am in the first of Udacity's two introductory statistics courses, Intro to Descriptive Statistics, preparing to tackle the final project, which is "an experiment dealing with drawing from a deck of playing cards and creating a write-up containing [my] findings." The material is rather elementary, but I'm very happy to have a gentle introduction to statistics. I know how complicated probability theory can be, and I'm not ready to dive in to the deep end of the theory--a bit of applied stats is all I want for now.

After this comes Intro to Inferential Statistics, the second and final of the suggested prerequisites to the forthcoming (and so-called) nanodegree in data analysis. I haven't decided whether to attempt to earn that (nano)degree, but I am certainly going to do my best to work through the second stats class: they are too useful for me never to have at least some training in them.