# Math Academy

35 Hacker News commenters recommended Math Academy and 1 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 0.75 years (6 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** People recommend it for a structured, distraction-free path through math with diagnosed gaps and many practice problems. The most common caveat is that the explanations are often too thin.

## Why people recommend it

- Structured skill tree with prerequisites (5 comments): "structured learning across an incremental skill tree with practise problems to prove to yourself that you understand" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46118443)) "Math Academy is doing it right. Their neat synthesis of spaced repetition and the knowledge DAG is slick" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49096334)) "support for card order/hierarchy/prerequisite an and encompassing graphs like what MathAcademy does" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46266970))
- Many practice problems with rising difficulty (3 comments): "I think the problem solving aspect makes it was more useful for bruteforcing your way towards building intuition" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45801075)) "I found myself understanding stuff the more I did it. And MathAcademy makes you do a lot of problems on repeat." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49859396)) "no videos. just short texts on how to solve a problem and then a bunch of problems with increasing difficulty." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46302549))
- Worth the cost for serious learners (3 comments): "I'm partial to MathAcademy for learning math as an adult learner. Not cheap but so so so worth it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46051296)) "Easily the most valuable learning resource I've ever spent money on. Highly recommend." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49859474)) "If it improves your learning efficiency by just 10% then it's worth it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49102381))
- Diagnoses gaps and targets weak spots (2 comments): "Math Academy will diagnose exactly where your gaps are and build you up in a series of bite-sized lessons" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47879391)) "It's good at identifying weak points and generating the problems you need to understand." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49383161))

## What people warn about

- Explanations too thin to build understanding (3 comments): "everything felt quite discrete and I didn't understand the relationships or purposes of what I was doing" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46124247)) "Mathacademy's lesson is very good but the explanation wasn't enlightening for me" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48965414)) "Each topic seemed to contain too little information to actually grasp it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49094704))
- Feels like rote drilling, not fluency (2 comments): "mathacademy is more similar to duolingo than it is to language immersion" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49859055)) "You have the rigid intelligence, but not the fluid (internalized?) one." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49859854))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Nand2Tetris](https://hackerapproved.com/p/nand2tetris.md): 31 recommend
- [Neural Networks: Zero to Hero by Andrej Karpathy](https://hackerapproved.com/p/neural-networks-zero-to-hero.md): 29 recommend
- [CS193p SwiftUI course by Paul Hegarty](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cs193p-swiftui-course.md): 13 recommend
- [CS336: Language Modeling from Scratch](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cs336-language-modeling-from-scratch.md): 12 recommend
- [CS50 by Harvard](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cs50.md): 11 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://mathacademy.com/)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Math Academy", https://hackerapproved.com/p/math-academy/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).