A Mind for Numbers – Quick Summary

1-Sentence Description of A Mind for Numbers by Barbara Oakley

The secrets to effectively learning math and science.

1. Two Modes of Thinking:Focused and Diffused. Use the focused mode to grapple with problems in any subject, and when you are done, relax your mind and disengage from the activity. This allows the unconscious to do its work, and will unlock potential solutions.
2. Chunking: To become an expert in math, you need to have conceptual chunks. These unite pieces of information together in a meaningful way. To form a chunk, focus on the information (no distractions), understand the idea, and reflect on when and how it can be used. In Piaget’s language, practice and repetition allows you to assimilate the information, but reflecting on it helps you assimilate it more effectively.
3. Interleave, don’t Overlearn:To overlearn means to continue to study a problem and practice it. To interleave means to solve a variety of problems that require different strategies.

Overlearning provides diminishing returns.

Techniques for Limited Study Time

1. Read, but don’t yet solve assigned homework and practice exams.
2. Review lecture notes.
3. Reworkexample problems presented in lecture notes.
4. Work assigned homework and practice exam questions.

Merely glancing at the solution to a problem and thinking you truly know it yourself is one of the most common illusions of competence in learning.

The dread of doing a task uses up more time and energy than doing a task itself.

Procrastination can be like taking tiny amounts of poison. It may not seem harmful at the time, but the long-term effects can be very damaging.

The title of the book doesn’t do it justice. This is a book about how to get good at anything, not just math and science. It’s a light read because it’s full of simple advice. But the stuff it teaches is effective, and I wish it had been taught to me back in 1997 when I was starting graduate school.

This book is not at all what it says on the cover, it’s just more tired “study tips” the same as you would get from any Universities student resource center. There’s nothing inherently specific about learning Math and honestly I found the book to be full of an awful lot of fluff… It’s a rather shockingly callous thing to do considering how many people struggle with Math to continually dance around the one fact present, it just takes a lot of time and effort and work and you may simply never crack it. Terrible book.

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Summary 3

1. Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
2. Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning
3. How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

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