This page collects together my various writings about Math Academy, an online service for mathematical education, along with various artifacts generated during my time using Math Academy.

I first saw Math Academy mentioned on X sometime in December 2024. I was intrigued enough to look into it further, but given the price of the service I decided to do some research first, primarily by reading the then-current version of Justin Skycak’s book The Math Academy Way: Using the Power of Science to Supercharge Student Learning. After reading the book and taking copious notes, I decided to both sign up for Math Academy and write a series of blog posts expanding on my notes and discussing my experiences.

Here’s that first set of posts, written during February 2025:

  • Part 1: My eigenvector embarassment, or why I decided to try out Math Academy.
  • Part 2: A skeptical prospect. My attempt to ignore the hype and start off with a pessimistic view of how effective Math Academy might be.
  • Parts 3-8: These posts contain my notes summarizing the material in The Math Academy Way, along with my occasional comments. Feel free to skip these if you’ve read the book or aren’t interested in my comments on it.
    • Part 3: The sales pitch. How Math Academy (the company) pitches Math Academy (the product).
    • Part 4: Addressing objections. Why objections to other online learning systems (supposedly) don’t apply to Math Academy.
    • Part 5: Product features. The various learning strategies embodied in the Math Academy system.
    • Part 6: Customer responsibilities. What Math Academy users (and those who may be responsible for them) need to do to ensure they actually learn something.
    • Part 7: Technology brief. The nerd section, with in-depth explanations of how the Math Academy system works.
    • Part 8: Follow-up questions and notes. The Math Academy FAQ, and material that hasn’t yet made it into the main body of the book The Math Academy Way.
  • Part 9: Customer feedback (non-pedagogical). My comments on my own experience with the Math Academy system, starting with the user interface and other aspects unrelated to the actual pedagogy.
  • Part 10: Customer feedback (pedagogical). My thoughts on learning mathematics with the Math Academy system, based on using it for about a month and completing the course Mathematical Foundations II.
  • Part 11: Final thoughts. Is Math Academy worth the money? Did I learn anything? Will Math Academy revolutionize mathematics education for everybody? Or even for just a few? And is that even worth worrying about in the Age of LLMs?

After that series of posts I’ve continued to publish updates on my Math Academy experience as I’ve completed more courses:

Various people have told me that they liked these posts, and that reading the posts even motivated them to sign up for Math Academy. It’s also fun to document my Math Academy journey. So, expect me to continue posting updates as long as I have something new to report.

Math Academy transcript and certificates of completion

Here are the official certificates of completion for the Math Academy courses I’ve finished thus far, along with my Math Academy transcript:

Math Academy activity logs

I take activity logs at the end of each course, with a start date corresponding to when I began the course and an end date of when I finished the course (usually that day). I try to be careful and not do coursework for two different courses on the same day, so that the activity log for a given course reflects only work for that course and no other.

Here are the activity logs for the courses I’ve completed thus far. This includes the original PDF files along with CSV files containing detailed data for each task, as extracted from the PDF files.

  • Mathematical Foundations III (2025/01/09 - 2025/02/05) (PDF, CSV) (note: the beginning of the log includes the diagnostic and two lessons for Mathematical Foundations III, after which I decided I would be better off starting with Mathematical Foundations II)
  • Mathematical Foundations III (2025/02/06 - 2025/05/19) (PDF, CSV)
  • Mathematics for Machine Learning (2025/05/20 - 2025/09/03) (PDF, CSV)
  • Linear Algebra (2025/09/04 - 2025/10/05) (PDF, CSV)
  • Calculus I (2025/10/06 - 2025/11/02) (PDF, CSV)
  • Calculus II (2025/11/03 - 2026/02/07) (PDF, CSV)
  • Multivariable Calculus (2025/02/08 - 2025/07/23) (PDF, CSV)

You’re welcome to use these logs for whatever you’d like. In particular, they may be useful for gauging the number of XP associated with a particular course—although, note that your experience will vary if you don’t follow the exact sequence of courses that I did.