[Mikau: Your intro is not lost, I had it in my browser's cache!  -MathsIsFun]

Hi, I'm mike. But you can call me Mikau.

I was homeschooled by my mother who didn't know much about math beyond 9th grade level. My dad was in advanced placement math when he was in school but he was too busy to teach me any advanced math, so I really didn't learn any high school math.

Mid spring of this year, I realized since I was 18 it was time for me to choose a career, I decided I'd like to be a video game programmer, since I'm fond of games, computers and thought it would be neat to program since I like creativity and rational thinking. However I was dismayed to find that all courses required above all else, math skills. Now I had never done even algebra 1. Not even algebra 1/2! But I wasn't going to let that stop me.

I asked my dad to teach my a lesson of algebra every day after he was done work and he said ok, but that was just too slow. I had to know high school math and I had to know it fast. So I began studying it on myself. I found if I read carefully, slowly and payed close attention to what was happening, it wasn't hard to teach myself. So I began studying relentlessly, doing 3 lessons a day which takes about 4 to 5 hours. (about an hour to study the lesson and an hour each of practice problems) my text books are 120 lessons each meant to be spread out over an entire school year, so I finish about a years worth of work in 40 days. Unfortunatle, mid summer I had a bit of a delay obtaining the next text book and I lost a painfull bit of time on that.

Anyways, I've now completed Algebra 1, Algebra 2 and I will be done trigonometry in 2 weeks. :-D man... its hard to believe only a year ago I didn't even know algebra 1!

Next month I start calculus. After that, I'm not sure what I'm going to do. There are some books on math for 3d game programmers that involve physics and 3D projection geometry, which are my main goals in my study. But I could also take calculus 2...

I got stuck on a problem on the normal curve the other day and went searching to see if their were any math message boards where I could ask for help, and thats how I found this place.