## Jon Besga

Personal notes about science, math, business, and programming

After several days of trying to go throught Gelfand by Algebra, I have noticed that I’m not working enough on the book. I have days where I work big chunks of time and then other days that I don’t do anything. I have decided to reduce my the amount of work in the book to small, but steady, amounts and use this blog to keep track of my efforts and as a tool for accountability.

As I plan to write the exercises in the blog, I have also installed the MathJax as Math rendering library so I can render cool math formulas like this one:

$$R = \frac{2GM}{c^{2}}$$

This is the formula to calculate the Schwarzschild radius of an object but I’ll write more in detail about it another time.

## Background

Before pursuing further my self-directed education in Physics, I’m catching up up with my lost mathematical knowledge and after working for around 4 weeks through the whole curriculum of Khan Academy, I have reached the 10th/11th grade. I feel much more confident with math but during the Mathematics II and Mathematics III sections is where I have noticed I have lost (or I never had them in first place) mathematical skills.

I have bought all the books from this guide and after a quick glance to Algebra, Gelfand I must say that it’s one of the best books to learn Algebra. Maybe not very good to learn it from scratch but It will defy the reader at several levels and it’s a book with personality, not like those dry modern textbooks.

My only critique with the book is that it has some really hard exercises, and I would lie if I said that I can complete all of those. Some are really really hard and definitely not for a high schooler or a self taught person (theoretically the target reader as this book is based on a math program by correspondence)