Climbing up the math tree

Earlier today a person on Quora asked me the following question:

“For a long time I have wanted to learn everything about math topics, but I don’t know where to start. What is the topic to start with and what are the following? MY GOAL is to be very good at math, so I appreciate don’t skip topics.”

I thought this was a really interesting and ambitious question, so I decided to answer it in some detail, and leave my response here for my Medium followers to see. In this response I assumed the person asking had yet to receive a college degree [in mathematics].