I’m gonna be honest y’all, all throughout my life people have given me so much shit for asking why something happens- repeatedly calling me childlike, telling me that’s just the way it is, it is what it is, etc. Shit sucks
Bringing this back to math though, the best math teachers I’ve ever had didn’t see a problem with providing the “why” and when that was given, I kinda succeeded. Who could’ve guessed, I didn’t hate math and thought there was a chance that I could do it if someone explained it in my language!
Trying to relearn some stuff for my own benefit, thought this new comm might be a good place to start my journey so let me know if you have any suggestions!
When you say you want to know about the "why" in the context of math, is it like "why should I learn this stuff" or "why is this true?"
My math interest is more in the abstract rather than practical applications (and also it really depends on the particular math subject) so I don't have many recommendations for the former, but for the latter I think that learning math that's proof based can really help with that. I guess this also depends on the math you're trying to learn, but I have some resources to recommend here.
If you know some calculus but want to learn more about the "why", an acquaintance of mine wrote something called Intuitive Explanations: https://intuitiveexplanations.com/assets/CalculusIntuitiveExplanations.pdf
If you want to learn a little about a lot of different math subjects, this is a book I read some parts of and generally highly recommend: Beyond Numeracy. Another recommendation along these lines is the YouTube channel 3blue1brown, I think that person does a really good job breaking down difficult concepts into approachable video lectures.
I don't have any particular proof based books to recommend (I learned the concepts in uni classes) but something that I'd keep in mind if I were you is that sometimes when you're following along with a proof, the proof will start to assert something that doesn't immediately make sense why they're doing that. If you suspend looking for the why until you've read the whole proof, often it will make more sense in retrospect (e.g. "oh, they arrested X so they could show Y so they could show Z which lets them prove A")
I also agree with the other commenter that it'd be useful to know more about the type of math you're looking for because the subject is so wide. For example, maybe you're looking for introductory algebra or precalculus, or maybe you want math that's useful, or math that's interesting and accessible but not normally studied in high school, or maybe you're really interested in differential equations.
Yeah I think I need a brush-up starting at college algebra. I suppose this might be the case for all maths, but there were some sections that came relatively easy and some that were pretty challenging.
I should’ve spent more time on the challenging sections in retrospect but instead decided that I was incapable of those which kinda echoes some of the sentiments discussed in a previous post here, interestingly enough.