What is Math Academy?

Math Academy is an online platform for the hyper efficient learning of maths. They’ve created a well scaffolded curriculum from 4th grade all the way to university level courses like Discrete Mathematics and Multivariable Calc.

What makes Math Academy hyper efficient?

Justin Skycak, has an insanely long and well detailed book on this. It has over 500 pages and contains all his citations and references, covering everything from motivation theory to spaced repetition implementations. I’d highly recommend checking it out if you’re even remotely interested in the field of learning.

Basically Math Academy does a few things extremely well:

1. An extremely well scaffolded knowledge graph, covering how different concepts layer and build upon each other.

   1. Maths follows a hierarchal knowledge structure, where each concept builds upon multiple different linked subconcepts. By specifically scaffolding the topics you learn, and adapting them to your current knowledge state, Math Academy basically acts as an automated private tutor and gives you content based on what you know.

      

2. ‘Fractional Implicit spaced Repetition (FIRe)’. Justin has a great blog post outlining how this works, but basically getting questions wrong in Math Academy will penalise or strengthen related concepts in your knowledge graph. This allows for selectively targeting quizzes and reviews towards concepts that are at the edge of forgetting, without having the massive overhead that usually comes with making a ton of Anki cards.

   

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3. Gamified system. Honestly this aspect could be improved, but Math Academy’s XP system is pretty addictive. 1 XP point is equivalent to 1 minute of focused effort, and there are leagues and ‘on track’ tools to keep you accountable. I found it pretty enjoyable overall, they’re coming out with a new ‘streaks’ feature which I’m excited to try.

   

My experience with it:

I completed Math Academy quite religiously throughout 2025. Below are some of my stats:

I completed most of the main university level courses they currently offer, bar Calc 1 and 2.

My setup was mostly using Concepts on my iPad as a scratchpad to draw, I also setup an iPadOS shortcut for it:

Pros:

• Math academy offers a ton of practice. Part of their core ethos is learning by doing, and you will spend most of your time solving questions rather than taking notes on concepts.

• Scaffolded curriculum all in one place. By trusting in their scaffolded knowledge graph, I don’t have to worry about studying concepts in the right order and collecting textbooks for different courses and worrying about discrepancies in what I’m being taught. Traditionally at university I’d have to context switch between different textbooks/classes but Math Academy provides a place to do everything at once.

• Gamification and community. It’s genuinely fun pushing myself to complete lessons to rank up on the leaderboards, and it’s been fun connecting with others who all share in the collective Math Academy spirit of grinding math to upskill in various domains.

Cons:

• The lessons are text and image based, and there are some concepts I feel could be better illustrated by mediums like video or interactive demonstrations. This usually can be supplemented by videos online (e.g. 3Blue1Brown’s linear algebra series) however it would be nice if Math Academy natively had everything in one place.

• Not enough questions where you have to apply your knowledge and truly understand the abstraction of mathematical concepts. This initially was a huge problem for me, but Math Academy eventually rolled out ‘Multi-step questions’ sometime in 2025 and this partly remedied my concerns. I still would like to see a lot more frequent ‘multi-step’ questions that involve applying my knowledge, as well as having them integrated into the timed quizzes to more properly replicate the test environments I’m familiar with.

• Delayed courses. Honestly this by far has been the biggest letdown for me. Math Academy’s full ‘Machine Learning’ course was originally slated to release sometime end of February/Early March 2025, and has been pushed back repeatedly. I routinely scoured Justin’s streams and tweets looking for updates etc, and still it is nearly the middle of January 2026 and the course has not been released. I understand there have been many setbacks, (they hired rapidly in 2025 but expectations regarding the difficulty of creating the scaffolded graph meant that basically only a few people could work on the course), but still at this moment all the projects, lessons, and infrastructure are in place but they’re waiting for UI touchups.

  • Additionally, there are multiple times that updates to the ‘Mathematics for Machine Learning’ course have been announced coming “in weeks” but it’s been months now without any sign of updates. I know the Math Academy team are busy (creating the curriculum is an intensive endeavour) so please temper your expectations regarding the pace of content output.

Anyway yeah that’s about it regarding my experience, I might flesh out this post a bit more regarding my thoughts on different courses but I’ve genuinely enjoyed doing it and would say I have a decent undergraduate level knowledge of maths after a year or so of Math Academy. It is pretty expensive ($49 USD per month) but I’d say it’s worth it if you enjoy maths or are looking to brush up on your skills.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions, more than happy to help as usual! Also please like and subscribe if you enjoyed, it really lets me know what you guys want to see :))