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How To Learn Math for Machine Learning, Fast

Even with zero math background

Marina Wyss - Gratitude Driven
Towards Data Science
10 min readJan 2, 2025

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Photo by Antoine Dautry on Unsplash

Do you want to become a Data Scientist or machine learning engineer, but you feel intimidated by all the math involved? I get it. I’ve been there.

I dropped out of High School after 10th grade, so I never learned any math beyond trigonometry in school. When I started my journey into Machine Learning, I didn’t even know what a derivative was.

Fast forward to today, and I’m an Applied Scientist at Amazon, and I feel pretty confident in my math skills.

I’ve picked up the necessary math along the way using free resources and self-directed learning. Today I’m going to walk you through some of my favorite books, courses, and YouTube channels that helped me get to where I am today, and I’ll also share some tips on how to study effectively and not waste your time struggling and being bored.

Do You Even Need to Know Math for ML?

First, let’s address a common question: Do you even really need to know the math to work in ML?

The short answer is: it depends on what you want to do.

For research-heavy roles where you’re creating new ML algorithms, then yes, you obviously need to know the math. But if you’re asking yourself if you…

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Towards Data Science
Towards Data Science

Published in Towards Data Science

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Marina Wyss - Gratitude Driven
Marina Wyss - Gratitude Driven

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