Computer Science, which I studied heavily as part of my undergraduate degree, is largely based on math. This is in contract to programming, which is based less on numeracy skills and more on the ability to communicate. When I left college, I was only a few credits short of obtaining a degree in mathematics as well. Discrete mathematics and multi-dimensional calculus was my jam. Not any more. I sometimes need to look things up to help my middle school-aged children with their homework. How far I've fallen.

I'm not going to try to boil the ocean here. Mathematics is so vast that there is no endpoint of it. There are also many sub-topics with math that I've learned over the years: algebra, trigonometry, geometry, statistics, numerical analysis, discrete mathematics, logic, and calculus. I dodged differential equations, but maybe not to my benefit. For now, I just want to get the fundamentals back - and hopefully stronger than before. I consider the fundamentals to be equivalent to a college-level understanding of algebra. I can worry about the rest later.

I spent a long time looking for the best book to learn what I want to. I settled on the book Basic Mathematics by Serge Lang. I plan to work the book from front to back.

I started working through this book and it's great. Despite being called "basic", it is not easy. The book immediately has the reader writing proofs, so there's no easing into the subjects. This is a hard book.

Work through Basic Mathematics from front to back while completing the, numerous, practice problems in the book.

I think I got discouraged. When I say this book is hard, I'm not joking. It took a long time to only make it a small way into the book. I like hard challenges, but didn't have the patience for this one when I dove in. I need to man up and get back at it.