- When you're sitting in a math class
and the teacher starts writing some symbols on the board
that you might not quite understand just yet,
it might be tempting to say,
"Hey, why do I need to lean this?
"This seems a little bit abstract for me."
And to answer that,
I'll tell you a story that one of my early advisors told me
when I was just starting Khan Academy.
This is someone who doesn't come from engineering,
doesn't come from science,
and doesn't come from mathematics.
He's actually a major restaurateur who has
a chain of restaurants some of you might have gone to.
And he says when he hires people,
he thinks about whether they understand algebra or not.
In fact, in his mind,
he devices the world into people who understand algebra
and people who do not understand algebra.
And the reason why he told me he does that is he says
when people understand algebra,
it gives him confidence that they have the critical thinking
and analytical skills to tackle
pretty much any problem in any domain.
And I think that is the practical reason
why algebra is so powerful.
It's really going to start to fine-tune
your critical thinking skills and your logic.
And beyond that, it's frankly just beautiful.
A lot of the equations you're going to learn,
the ways of manipulating equations,
philosophers, mathematicians were developing these
for thousands of years,
and now you get to understand the outcome
of their thousands of years
of hitting a head against the wall
and coming up with these beautiful expressions
that are really the fundamental truths of the universe.
So when you go into this algebra journey
that we're about to start,
learn the math,
learn the tools you're about to,
because it's really a form of expression.
It's a form, it's a way of representing
pure ideas in the universe and our minds.
In these lessons,
we're going to talk about some of that history,
the origins of algebra.
We're also going to think about
what is an algebraic expression,
and what are things like unknowns and variables?
And finally, we're going to really start
to build out our toolkit
on how do we manipulate these things?
How do we speak the language of algebra
and utilize these tools to solve everyday problems?
So let's start this adventure together.
There might be moments where you're
a little bit unsure of yourself,
or you're a little bit not sure
of how one thing leads to another.
But trust me,
if you go into the content, pause videos,
and see if you can solve things on your own
before I work through it with you,
and then make sure again that you can do it on your own.
And I encourage you to go to khanacademy.org
and practice these same concepts on the site,
where you'll get immediate feedback,
to make sure that you're understanding them.
Algebra is going to be a powerful toolkit
not just for your studies,
but for your entire life.