Math-for-physics books recommendation plea - with two twists
As in the topic, I'm asking for recommendations for a books (supplanted perhaps with other resources) given my uncommon situation. The explanation is a bit lenghty, please bear with me.
Motivation and general aims:
I'm a freshly minted PhD in biology, I focus on protein structure and evolution, and bioinformatics is my main tool, from which Molecular Dynamics simulations is one of my favourite - so You can see where my interest in physics comes from - simulations of systems of rigid bodies, hydrodynamics simulations, force field and model building for MD (and getting parameters for those from quantum chemistry calculations), and so on. I am also fascinated by superfluids. Alas, as great as my undergraduate courses may have been, they have severly lacked math and physics - we only got half a year algebra, half a year of analysis and our physics course was, really... high school level at best.
Having finished my PhD and moving away from destitute country of my birth, I can now afford to try to grow, and that is what I am going to do.
Big Issue 1#
The issue, however, is that I am dyslectic, and strongly. In particular, the tests I've taken as a kid showed a striking disability for memorizing abstract symbols and associating them with their meanings (fun fact: it took me years to memorize for whom the triangle and circle stand for on toilet's doors). One can easily see how that can be a problem for self-learning math (and japanese too, unfortunately) from an average book - I've been trying <PERSON>'s "Understanding Analysis" recently and rebounded like a ball from a wall, even tough I quite liked the conversational style. The problem is compounded by a fact that I am a postdoc and most of my time to learn anything is when I ride a bus to/from facility and read ebooks on my kindle - so I have to make all the transformations in my head.
Big Issue 2#
Let's be honest, my mathematical skills are rusty as hell. 855
It's been 10 years since I've last had a proper math course, even more since I've really systematically cracked problems and thus I noticed that more often than not even tough I understand the idea behind some proof or derivation, I have incredible difficulty following it because author goes from equation x to equation x+1 without explaining HOW, because, well, it should be obvious. This comes with practice, but to practice one needs examples with explanations and exercises of particular problems with answers. (<PERSON>'s book seems to be targeted for mathematicians and has exercises of proof building).
Wrapping it up: I am a biologist specializing in a field close to physics. So I want to learn/do some physics too, but first I need to build up my math. As a kid, i loved math, I had a great intuition for it and I am not scared. As a first year student, I've toyed with complex numbers, matrices, derivatives and integrals, but that was short and was 10 years ago. I need to rebuild my problem solving skills, relearn the facts I had (so how exactly do You make <PERSON> elimination again?) and I need to do it despite:
* my brain obnoxiously refusing to remember abstract symbols (so, figures, schemes and lots of text help, as well as operations as explicit as they can)
* having no one to ask for help/advice with every problem i stumble upon (explicit operations again, as well as answers to excersises, examples of solutions, etc.)
I am purposefully not listing the branches of math's I need - please refer to Motivations section where I describe the branches of physics I am interested in and use this as a guide. I think it is clear why I am posting this question here instead of mathematics.se
I will be happy to clarify should a need arise, please ask in the comments!
I would be very grateful for advice! 855