Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nicci00 | Hacker News Reader

Id be useful to have a "math for programmers book" that uses pseudo code instead of math notation. I studied math notation in 8th grade and then forgot about it.

View on HN

Possibly, but if you want to learn maths, then the notation is one of the smallest, easiest parts of it, and it's really helpful for the bigger, harder parts.

Code is usually way more verbose than maths notation, so things get a lot bigger and it can be a lot harder to see what's going on. Learning maths notation is like learning the basic syntax of a programming language related to one you know already - there's not much to it and it doesn't take long to be able to read it comfortably. If you can already code then you know the basics and many relevant concepts already.

"Coding the matrix" was the breakthrough for me in grokking linear algebra, and this is what it does. Things are explained in terms of matrices and the mathematical transformations, and then explained in terms of python data structures and a loop over the elements. And most of the examples are computer science, like rotating images.

I remember this course when it first came out, but didn't go through it since I didn't actually know how to program/code back then. Should I just buy the paperback off Amazon?

It's pretty cheap. I'd say go for it.

I didn't even know it was a course, I just got the book on Kindle. But I'd say go for it - as the other commenter said, it's cheap, and it doesn't require much coding knowledge, and it even explains most of what you do need to know if it's new to you. The real breakthrough is implementing the transformation in terms of fairly simple loops - which as a coder worked well for my brain. A non-coder might not find the advantage as big as I did, but I certainly don't think someone who can pick up some basic coding would struggle to understand what is being taught.

Check out this short excerpt of definitions and examples of the math "alien symbols": https://minireference.com/static/excerpts/set_notation.pdf They are really not that bad once you learn their meaning + very useful shorthand (you can think of math notation as a DSL with specific expressions for math operations).

Longer preview of the book: https://minireference.com/static/excerpts/noBSguide_v5_previ... and here is another preview of the LA book: https://minireference.com/static/excerpts/noBSguide2LA_previ... Both books have been pretty popular with the programming crowd. They use standard math notation, but there are lots of code examples and computing analogies, so you'll feel right at home.

This book (Data Science Bookcamp) uses actual Python code instead of math notation. https://www.manning.com/books/data-science-bookcamp

A Programmer's Introduction to Mathematics is probably what you're looking for. https://pimbook.org/

I bought the book attempted to study from it and I am not a fan. It covers topics too briefly to be called an "introduction" to mathematics. If you have a solid math background and need a refresher you may find it useful, otherwise I found MIT OCW Mathematics for Computer Science to be a much more suitable introduction, and it comes with problem sets and answers (for the 2010 course). You can also purchase the course notes in book form on Amazon.

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...

solutions https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B4G5KBKimr07WXRlT0VK...

physical book https://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Computer-Science-Eric-Leh...

If you can't even learn the syntax how will you ever learn the semantics?

Here's a start https://github.com/Jam3/math-as-code

Reply on news.ycombinator.com