An oldie but a goodie. IMHO, this paper, along with Larry and Sergei's original work[0], should be part of every Linear Algebra course. Few things get students to pay attention like the mention of ungodly amounts of money!
Do you mean in school or in university?
Because if somebody is taking linear algebra in university and still didn't understand that this is an extremely important topic, then he should maybe go back to school or take a gap year or something to improve his general education.
From a university lecture in linear algebra, I expect that it carries me through as many important topics as possible while giving me the tools to form a good formal and intuitive understanding.
The motivation part should be solved by that time.
Because not everyone professor romanticizes the subject or discusses its importance, not teaching anything other than surface details about problems.
I really liked it when we went over PageRank in one my university lectures. It made me think "Wow, I can actually have an impact using the things I've learned here".
From a university lecture in linear algebra, I expect that it carries me through as many important topics as possible while giving me the tools to form a good formal and intuitive understanding.
Sure and unless your goal is to do pure mathematics research, part of that is providing some motivation in terms of understanding applications. There's nothing wrong with a class on LA (or any other topic as far as that goes) spending some time motivating study of the topic by showing how it can be useful... even explaining how it might used to make millions or billions of dollars.
Right now in nearly every Math book that is bought by a College student or High School student has motivations in Phyaics. So a person could go through HS, get their Undergraduate degree in CS and then never figure out how math could be useful in their job at all. When students ask "when am I going to use this" you have already failed in teaching your students how to apply this.
Once they have reached this point either they will have a really bad impression of math and just give up OR they will believe whatever you say after words and get rewarded ten years down the line.
raises hand
I was that kid.
I had to take differential equations, linear algebra, and discrete systems for my CS undergrad. I loved math, and I did my best but I eventually got bogged down and lost interest.
Since then I’ve come to appreciate more why you would want that advanced math as a programmer, but my experience at the time was that I could brute force almost anything with enough for-loops.
It just didn’t occur to me that there were interesting problems that were too complex to brute force, or that brute force would lead to such tangled code in some cases that it wouldn’t be debuggable.
Frankly, I doubt more liberal arts would’ve convinced me. I needed to get knee deep in big bad code and domain specific problems before I’d realize what I missed.