Think Linear Algebra (2023)

(allendowney.github.io)

96 points | by tamnd 8 hours ago

6 comments

  • staplung 1 hour ago
    Allen Downey (author of the above) has a number of books on computer science-y things. You can buy hardcopies but I think all of them are also just freely available.

    Here's a few:

    Think Complexity

    https://github.com/AllenDowney/ThinkComplexity2

    Think DSP

    https://github.com/AllenDowney/ThinkDSP

    Think Stats

    https://github.com/AllenDowney/ThinkStats/

    Think Bayes

    https://github.com/AllenDowney/ThinkBayes2/

  • s-zeng 3 hours ago
    Matrix multiplication introduced before vector addition... the "Linear Algebra Done Right" in me is screaming inside.

    That being said, it is definitely cool to have a Jupyter-notebook based set of examples of practical linear algebra

    • bsoles 2 hours ago
      And eigenvectors in the first lesson!
      • finghin 2 hours ago
        I think at the beginning of learning LA I would have benefited from a more broad introduction to the topic by explaining that it is the algebra of transformations, generally linear transformations, and also the art of quantifying those transformations in meaningful ways.

        I would have benefited from some more handwaving in this regard (matrix multiplication, eigenvectors and eigenvalues) and less on the mechanics of the operations, before starting on the basic technicalities. But a “lesson” on these topics on day 0 is too soon

  • emang23 10 minutes ago
    Beyond regression, I’d like to see chapters on statistical topics like PCA, CCA. This textbook format which interleaves code and prose is the perfect way to show how scikitlearn’s decomposition.cca and decomposition.pca are implemented, e.g. the SVD matrix decomposition, etc.
  • The_Blade 2 hours ago
    Linear Algebra is dope, as in when we got to apply some mid-level linear to a real business problem and it worked i got high
    • bonsai_spool 51 minutes ago
      What was the business problem, broadly? How did you apply linear algebra to it?
  • fnord77 2 hours ago
    I got my hands on a stanford Math 55 textbook and tried to do the exercises in numpy.