Last month I completed Mathematical Foundations I on Math Academy. After doing daily love cards for most of 2024, I was on the hunt for a new daily practice for this year.

I heard about Math Academy on X, signed up and completed the diagnostic in the first few days of January 2025. The result of that assessment was enlightening. Me and math were not close friends. At all. So I started MFI, aiming for 30-40XP per day (1 XP is approx. 1 minute of concentrated effort). A few weeks later, I was making good progress and, critically, having fun. The routine became, essentially, read with a coffee in the AM, do my daily math, and then crack on with Subset stuff.

Starting the day with something that’s consistently challenging and getting dopamine hits from overcoming said challenge yielded a lot of positive energy. It also served as a tracker for the state of my cognition per day—kind of like an accidental “readiness score”. This in turn helped me identify some relationships between lifestyle choices and cognitive capacity.

Naturally, a new thing was demonstrably working and getting results, so I changed it. I quickly ratcheted my daily XP goal from 30-40 to 50 to 60 to 100. Adherence became less practical and thus cratered. This messed up my math practice rhythm for a number of weeks before I was able to recalibrate and settle back into the easy 40XP pace that had been working so well for me. I’m still maintaining that pace today.

Our physical bodies are designed to move. Without sufficient stimulus they begin to decay. In the realm of movement, “sufficient” isn’t just spending an hour doing half-hearted reps of nonsense physical movements whilst listening to brainrot podcasts. It’s more like baking movement into the other 23 hours of one’s day.

Similarly, I suspect our cognition is designed to be exercised, to be challenged on a daily basis. Really challenged. And doing math each day has been a key source of that for me. It will remain that for probably the rest of 2025, as the aim is now to complete the Mathematical Foundations sequence by year’s end.

For now, though, I’m enjoying the process—Math Academy has made consistently doing a hard thing fun. Below is a learning retro that I think emphasises that.

---

Summary

• My mathematical foundation was, uhh, lacking and it is slowly and steadily being built up
• Conversational quantitative fluency subtly alters how one sees, thinks and acts
• One must remember that there is a limit to the applicability of mathematics–it does not solve everything

Key takeaways

• Most seemingly insurmountable problems can be decomposed into a sequence of comprehensible operations
• The primitives for such operations are simple and offer near infinite composability for framing and interrogating problems
• Basic math ops–like working with fractions, dealing with radicals, doing sequential calculations–get tricky if one’s attention wanders
• There’s a real elegance to math–reality has a surprising amount of detail, and the way that details intertwines is often beautiful

Applications

• Aides me during many aspects of Subset’s continued evolution, from product and engineering through to entrepreneurship
• Helps me to zoom out and/or zoom into problem spaces that I’m personally interested in (eg modelling systems in biology and computing)

Questions and gaps

• Lots of general “WTF?” instances that I was able to move past (eventually)
• How does mathematical thinking diverge from computational thinking?
• How does this approach to talent development really differ from more outcome-orientated approaches (see Cedric Chin’s and Justin Skycak’s dialogues)?
• How could I apply the structures and approaches cited in The Math Academy Way to other active arenas–Brazilian jiu-jitsu, climbing, entrepreneurship?
• Is there an equivalent to the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics within more qualitative, softer domains?
• What’s the right amount of quantitative literacy, generally, for this historical moment?
• How feasible is it to expect one’s fluency in prerequisites to advanced subject matter to be maintable for decades?

Next steps

• Continued practice via Mathematical Foundations II
• Continued progression of Subset will involve mathematical thinking

Reflection

Rate understanding of topic from 1-5 (least to most)

• 4/5

Describe in 2-3 sentences how this learning connects to existing knowledge

• It’s a new (for me) form of meta cognition for thinking in and around different domains
• It’s like unlocking a novel overlay for seeing-acting in the world