§ Courses · a re-introduction to fundamentals
We don't revisit the basics. We redefine them.
If you think "math is hard" describes you, I think it describes the way you were taught. Even at places like Carnegie Mellon, the fundamentals get reduced to a race for grades — memorize, regurgitate, protect the GPA, learn nothing. I went through that machine and came out convinced the material was never the problem. These courses are built from the ground up for genuine growth: research-backed technique, real problem-solving, and mistakes treated as the load-bearing part of learning.
Why these three, out of everything?
I keep a map of the core life skills — the ones that pay into everything else. Five pillars: critical thinking, problem-solving & creativity; effective communication; self-management & learning; emotional intelligence; and physical health. The premise under all of it is holistic: everything you learn helps every other thing, directly or indirectly — it's why I stack skills a month at a time.
Most of that map you can — and should — train in the wild: communication by talking to strangers, self-management by shipping things, health in a gym. But the first pillar is different. Mathematical, computational, and statistical thinking are the ones where self-teaching quietly fails: your own bad intuition grades your own work, and nobody's there to catch it. They're the skills that benefit most from a controlled environment — a small group, real problems, feedback before the wrong habit sets. So out of everything I'd love to teach, these three are where a live course genuinely beats a reading list. That's why they're the ones on offer.
01 · Mathematical Thinking
Live, small-group, six sessions. The struggle you feel with math isn't a verdict on you — struggle is what learning is supposed to feel like, the same as it does on a violin or a soccer pitch. This course rebuilds your relationship with rigorous thinking: proofs, induction, probability, and the famous problems that don't seem to make sense — taught interactively (short instruction, reflection, group problem-solving), graded by effort and growth instead of correct answers, with a final exam that's semi-collaborative on purpose.
Reference material is all public — the course is inspired by CMU's 15-151/15-251 tradition (Profs. John Mackey and Anil Ada), Clive Newstead's An Infinite Descent into Pure Mathematics, and Feller's probability classic. What you're paying for is the room, the pacing, and the un-teaching of the grade-race reflexes.
Reserve a seat — next run scheduled by the waitlist.
The first run happened in 2024 (online + in-person NYC). The next one gets scheduled when the waitlist fills, and seats go in reservation order. The course is $200 (need-based adjustment available — ask); $10 reserves your seat and is credited toward the price.
Checkout runs on Polar. Plain-language terms — the short version: reservations are refundable until a run is scheduled, then credited.
02 · Computational Thinking — IN DESIGN
The principles under algorithms and data structures — decomposing problems, building efficient solutions, and carrying that mindset into contexts that have nothing to do with code. Not a coding bootcamp; the thinking underneath one. The first run gets scheduled by its waitlist, seats in reservation order — $10 holds yours, credited toward the course, refundable any time until a run is scheduled.
03 · Statistical Thinking — IN DESIGN
Reading data without being lied to: distributions, probability in the wild, and the misleading statistics that pass for arguments. The most practically useful of the three, and the one the school system skips hardest. Same deal — the waitlist schedules the first run, seats in reservation order, $10 holds yours, credited and refundable until then.
What the three add up to.
Mathematical thinking gives you rigor and abstraction; computational thinking gives you decomposition and process; statistical thinking gives you judgment under uncertainty. Together they're the problem-solving toolkit everything else sits on — trying to learn advanced material without them is like trying to get better at soccer on a terrible diet. One more honest note on why I take this seriously: the first paid run of these courses was scheduled to start the day I had to leave the US — the visa clock won that round. The curriculum survived; the mission got personal.