Penyngton

I believe that the 'official answer' is that SageMath is the best of the free software CASs. I personally use Maxima, because it's good enough for my use cases (which involve a lot of finite sets and not many inequalities) and I've found it simpler to understand.

Obviously, Mathematica is the leader in academia generally, as far as I can tell, but I personally haven't had good experiences with it myself, but I also have a strong preference for free software, so I haven't tried to hard to get used to it.

I might be interested. How many people are you? What is your background (professionals/students/etc)? Are you planning to work in Java, C, or C++?

One of the few surviving industries we've got.

Yes and no. Maybe I should have quoted the following part of the parent's comment:

> whenever civil protection and economic freedom gives them any semblance of a choice, the number of children they get goes way down.

Which is clearly falsified by the link I posted.

I certainly agree with you that the economics of raising children is not right in western countries, but this still doesn't deter women from wanting more children than they're having, so I don't think it's at all fair to say that fewer are willingly choosing to have them.

I've personally read An Introduction to Mathematical Reasoning: Numbers, Sets and Functions Paperback by Peter Eccles and Chapter Zero by Carol Schumacher and would recommend them both.

Sadly, this is not an easy thing to learn and requires a lot of work and most importantly discipline. You mustn't let yourself be at all complacent. It's very easy when doing exercises by yourself to believe that you've "got the idea" and you can "see how it works", but the key is to actually write _everything_ down, so that there is no room for handwaving at all. This is not easy to force yourself to do, but it is necessary.

I'm not quite in the situation you're looking for, because I have got an undergraduate maths degree, but due to my personal situation at the time, I wasn't a good student and I have done a lot of self-teaching in the years since then. Mainly in mathematics, but also theoretical computer science and some programming.

One thing I'd say is don't overlook books. Textbooks may seem less appealing than slides or videos, but seriously sitting and reading a maths book from cover to cover is a very powerful experience. It may take months, but you will learn something significant from doing it. And if you do that for say Thomas's Calculus and Anton's Elementary Linear Algebra, that's about half of a maths degree already.

Anyway, I'm happy to discuss these topics further with you (or anyone else reading this). I'd personally love to find a serious online community for studying mathematics, but it seems very hard to coordinate such a thing.

I agree with you, but this is how bullies get their way.

SML is probably my favourite programming language, and ML for the Working Programmer is probably my favourite programming book. It is indeed sad to think that I'll probably never use it seriously or even meet another SML programmer in my life (I met one at university in a larger city once, but it seems unlikely to happen again where I am now).

OCaml is good, though I personally dislike its complexity compared to SML ("Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." and all that). There are also remote OCaml jobs in the world, so it's not completely impossible I could do something like that in the future.

Your own link says:

> However, a large number of epidemiologic studies (both case-control and cohort studies) in humans have found no consistent evidence that dietary acrylamide exposure is associated with the risk of any type of cancer (9, 14).

I did that a bit more than a decade ago and everything worked except for the "picture language" section from chapter 2, but that's a very minor part of the course. There may have been an occasional definition I had to add to get code to work, but it was certainly nothing difficult.