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Comment by laretluval | Hacker News Reader

If you're interested in more great animations for a visual understanding of linear algebra, I can't recommend 3Blue1Brown's "Essence of Linear Algebra" series on Youtube highly enough.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2x...

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These are the best linear algebra videos I've ever seen. The creator is now working on an introductory calculus series. He's already released the first few episodes to patrons.

Wasn't he hired by Khan Academy recently? It's great if that helps a wider audience to benefit from his work.

I think it's the reverse. He did all or most of their multivariable calc series, and maybe some other things for them.

And then started to do his own thing a little more.

Holy shit. I wish I'd had access to these videos during my Mattix Algebra (I think it was called) course in undergrad. I feel like my lack of truly understanding LA has somewhat impaired my grasp of some of the other topics covered in CS undergrad and grad school.

Seriously... the hallmark of all the linear algebra classes I had was the instructor completely failing to demonstrate the various concepts in visual terms. And that's pretty unforgivable, since linear algebra feels like one of those subjects where, until you have some key components of it modeled in your head that serve to glue everything together, every new may as well be random words pulled from a foreign dictionary.

Some of this comes down to learning-style. It sounds like your lecturer was not a visual thinker. Some people really like to just get the algebra and have-at-it (not me tho.) The "model" you refer to doesn't need to be visual. There are applications of linear algebra where the visual stuff just doesn't help much.

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