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.