It's crazy that Linear Algebra is one of the deepest and most interesting areas of mathematics, with applications in almost every field o...
It's crazy that Linear Algebra is one of the deepest and most interesting areas of mathematics, with applications in almost every field of mathematics itself plus having practical applications in almost every quantitative field that uses math. But it is SOOO boring to learn the basic mechanics. There's almost no way to sugar coat it either; you have to learn the basics of vectors and scalars and dot products and matrices and Gaussian elimination, all the while bored out of your skull, until you have the tools to really start to approach the interesting areas. Even the "why does matrix multiplication look that way" is incredibly deep but practically impossible to motivate from other considerations. You just start with "well that's the way it is" and grind away until one day when you're looking at a chain of linear transformations you realize that everything clicks. This "little book" seems to take a fairly standard approach, defining all the boring stuff and leading to Gaussian elimination. The other approach I've seen is to try to lead into it by talking about multi-linear functions and then deriving the notion of bases and matrices at the end. Or trying to start from an application like rotation or Markov chains. It's funny because it's just a pedagogical nightmare to get students to care about any of this until one day two years later it all just makes sense.
Posted by andrewla on Sep 2, 2025, 6:02 PM
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The biggest problem with MOND is that it was hand-crafted with additional parameters simply to fit the data.
(My comment is about detached houses).
The biggest problem with this is that I can't run my company's own internal benchmarks against this API, because they will be trained int...
> steer Claude away from over-engineering parts of the system in response to hypothetical concerns.
Why is there no comparison with FLUX 3 Image?
> our Git monorepo was developing an annoying problem Sentences like this are so common from people using monorepos that I am convinced ...
Why is there no contact form?
The biggest problem with plugging a generator into an outlet is you need a double ended cord.
It's crazy that Linear Algebra is one of the deepest and most interesting areas of mathematics, with applications in almost every field o...
It's crazy that Linear Algebra is one of the deepest and most interesting areas of mathematics, with applications in almost every field of mathematics itself plus having practical applications in almost every quantitative field that uses math. But it is SOOO boring to learn the basic mechanics. There's almost no way to sugar coat it either; you have to learn the basics of vectors and scalars and dot products and matrices and Gaussian elimination, all the while bored out of your skull, until you have the tools to really start to approach the interesting areas. Even the "why does matrix multiplication look that way" is incredibly deep but practically impossible to motivate from other considerations. You just start with "well that's the way it is" and grind away until one day when you're looking at a chain of linear transformations you realize that everything clicks. This "little book" seems to take a fairly standard approach, defining all the boring stuff and leading to Gaussian elimination. The other approach I've seen is to try to lead into it by talking about multi-linear functions and then deriving the notion of bases and matrices at the end. Or trying to start from an application like rotation or Markov chains. It's funny because it's just a pedagogical nightmare to get students to care about any of this until one day two years later it all just makes sense.
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