“But Don’t You Need 10,000 Hours To Learn Math?”

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No, you don’t need 10,000 hours to learn math. Math Academy’s foundations series that goes from fractions to first-year university is benchmarked about 15,000 XP, about 250 hours of focused work. Of course, there’s plenty of university math to dig your teeth into after that, but that’s the order of magnitude of work we’re talking.

In general, the 10,000 hour rule is less of a precise measurement and more of an order-of-magnitude estimation of the work needed to reach world-class expert performance, traveling through ALL stages in Bloom’s talent development process.

Math Academy focuses on stage 2. As you go through the stages, the mount of time required increases. Stage 3 would involve making the turn from being solid on university math to becoming a world-class mathematician outputting groundbreaking research, or a world-class programmer developing cutting-edge mathy tech, or something like that. That’s a very time-consuming process and it typically requires a mentor. Here’s some context about my own experience with that.

I’ve benchmarked the amount of time I personally spent learning math in stage 2, and it came out to about 3000 hours, NOT engaging in the most efficient learning techniques (computation breakdown is available in footnotes here). Divide that by 4 due to MA’s learning efficiency and the number starts to line up pretty well with our XP measurements.

I’d benchmark that I spent about 6500 hours (let’s say 40-60h/week for 2-3 years) purely on coding in stage 3 between the time I took responsibility for our developing our AI system and the time it became fully fledged, fully stable. Before that I also spent some years working in data science and academic research, which had quite a bit of skill transfer, so maybe add another couple thousand hours for that.

If you add all this time up then yeah, you’re sitting somewhere around 10,000 hours. I do think that’s the right order of magnitude estimate of the work required to get to a world-class level in a math-heavy thing.

I should also say, the hours I’m benchmarking above are purely for math/coding. The whole education side of things was another ~10,000 hours (20h/week year-round tutoring for 5 years during HS/college, 40h/week tutoring & teaching during academic year 5 years after that). This was happening simultaneously in parallel alongside all the coding work.

Basically, doing serious stuff takes a shit-ton of work, and learning serious math is a component of that if you’re wanting to do serious mathy things, but it’s not anywhere near the entirety of what’s being talked about in discussions of the 10,000 hour rule (which, again, isn’t a hard rule but more of an order-of-magnitude estimate).

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