well, so far i think ive found a new best friend for creating music (pure data,
teehee :D)

believe it or not, ive gathered from intense digging and plain old intuition that pure data likes to use mathematics.

the problem is, i dont.

i have never been good at math. my times table looks like a derelict, it takes me a half an hour to do long division, and i never got past high school algebra. part of it was my own fault, and part of it was that i never felt comfortable with my instructors over the years. a lot of times i feel like they just told me to do this this and that, and never "why" (which i need, in order to understand a concept).

anyway, enough about my life story, on with the question.

how about some recommendations for learning mathematics? i think i would learn much more easily with words than formulae, as i understand abstract concepts (geometry actually comes very naturally to me).

a bit of direction, i would mainly like to learn mathematics to help me better understand physics (contemporary), and also to get me to a higher level of using pure data.

thanks for any information, and sorry for my chemistry-driven post-o-rama of incredibly meaningless density.

I use these if I have any issues I have questions on in my math classes in college, but don't have the instructor handy for questions:

http://www.onlinecollegeclasses.com/mathematics-resources.html
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/

Short of looking up things online, look up math text books that are an edition or two older than is currently being used (they're never any different in content, they just change the problems up) and learn from reading them and going through their exercises. Often, you can get these older texts for less than $5.

A lot of people really like the Khan Academy videos. They're in various places online, but you can find them on YouTube. They're basically short explanations of concepts using very accessible language.

I also recommend looking around iTunes U if you're an iTunes user. There's some great stuff on there, a lot of which is available in other places, but it's easier to search for them in iTunes than, say, YouTube. I think the Khan Academy stuff is on there, too. I used it in my first year in my Master's program to teach myself Linear Algebra and Physics. I personally prefer full lectures over brief explanations of a single topic because I can get a better understanding of the usefulness and applications of such topics. MIT has some full semester lectures available for free on there which I can't recommend enough. Gilbert Strang is a nerdy bad-ass.

ah, thanks for the replies. i hadnt considered that there might be lectures on youtube. i know the library does often have some good lectures on dvd, but i havent yet checked out their lectures on mathematics.

Forgot to mention MIT's OCW:
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics

(which is what maelstorm mentions at the end of his post)

I second those lectures on khan academy. some of the videos have exercises on their website khanacademy.org and these days you can ask for a tutor, but i think the videos are more than enough.
I´ve had the same problem since i started using pd. Id say get your hands on any math book with tons of exercises and try to solve them. Ive used engineering mathematics by Stroud, its pretty concise and might help you get started on algebra and calculus before getting deep into the scary stuff.
probably "designing sound" by andy farnell and "musimathics" will help you start building the bridge between math, physics and sound too.