Skip to content

Comment on Robotics 101 at UMich: Applied numerical linear algebra as intro linear algebraparent

Comments

i don't really care how many people i respect liked it, i have to be honest, i hated strang's "linear algebra and its applications."

there's a strang text on computational science that was much more my speed (less of the baby talk and repetitive manual arithmetic exercises) and i think that some of the revisions that came later (+ "learning with data") were better.

i did not find doing endless exercises of gaussian elimination or qr factorization by hand on small matrices to be all that enlightening.

this michigan course looks awesome!

less of the ... repetitive manual arithmetic exercises

I think this post (from a math academy employee) has a good argument for why these sorts of exercises are important. It's about basic arithmetic, but I think it applies to tedious things like performing gaussian elimination on small matrices as well.

https://www.justinmath.com/if-you-want-to-learn-algebra-you-...

I like to come at it from both angles - higher level with useful applications, and then lower level "I could maybe implement this if I had to" exercises. The latter are tedious, and hard to motivate effort for without the former. Ultimately, as the post argues, I agree that if you don't understand the lower level (tedious) operations, you will only get so far in your ability to apply LA.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.