Learning Calculus at 30, for No Reason at All

I was scared of calculus in school.

Actually, scared, bored and lazy. All three.

Whenever calculus came up, I just wanted to somehow get through it. I would learn the formula, solve the questions and move on. I never really stopped to understand what I was doing.

My maths teachers were actually pretty good. So I don’t think it was really their fault. They were trying to teach us. It’s just that back then we didn’t have all these ways of visualising things that we have now.

A teacher would write a formula on the board, explain it, and then we’d practice it.

I could use the formula. I just couldn’t really see it.

That’s probably what feels so different now.

I’ve been watching videos on things like slopes, intercepts and functions, and seeing someone actually draw what is happening makes a huge difference.

A slope isn’t just some m sitting inside y = mx + b.

You can actually see the line.

You can see the intercept.

You can move up and move right and see how the line changes.

It’s very basic stuff, but I never really saw it that way when I was 15.

I started learning maths again about a week ago.

There wasn’t really a plan behind it.

One of the reasons I even ended up doing this is AI.

A lot of my work used to involve sitting with a problem for a while and figuring it out. Sometimes it was some annoying logic problem. Sometimes it was an architecture question. Sometimes I’d be debugging something around Redis queues and just thinking through what was actually happening.

That was a normal part of my work.

Now I use AI a lot, and obviously it helps. I’m not complaining about that. It would be pretty stupid to complain about something that makes my work easier.

But I did notice something.

I don’t have to sit and figure things out as much as I used to.

If I’m stuck, I can ask.

If I need an approach, I can ask.

If I need to understand some code or architecture, I can ask.

Most of the time I get something useful back.

And I started feeling like I wanted to do something where I couldn’t just ask for the answer.

So I opened up maths again.

Some days I’ve been doing calculus. Some days I’ve looked at linear algebra.

I’ve just been sitting at my desk watching videos and then trying things myself.

No course. No exam. No project. Nothing.

I recently spent some time doing y = mx + b again.

I had a notebook out and was actually plotting the lines. Find the intercept, then use the slope to figure out where the next point should be. Rise and move right.

Then do another one.

And another one.

It sounds ridiculously simple when I write it down.

But I was actually thinking about what I was doing this time instead of just remembering a formula.

I also get stuck quite a lot.

Sometimes I watch something and think, okay, I understand this.

Then I try to do it myself and realise I don’t.

So I go back and watch it again.

Some things just take time to digest.

And I actually like that.

There is something nice about sitting there for a while and not immediately knowing the answer.

Maybe that’s partly what I was looking for.

Not necessarily to become better at maths. Not to use calculus in some project. Not even because I have some big goal in mind.

I don’t really care if it’s useful.

I’m enjoying it.

It’s basically my version of doing Sudoku, except I’ve done enough Sudoku that it has started getting a little repetitive.

So this is what I’m doing instead.

I don’t know how far I’ll take it.

Maybe I’ll stop after calculus. Maybe I’ll get properly into linear algebra. Maybe I’ll get bored and move on to something completely different.

It doesn’t really matter.

Something I was scared of at 15 is something I actually enjoy doing at 30.

And right now, that’s enough of a reason.