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Comment by melenaboija | Hacker News Reader

3Blue1Brown series on linear algebra is an amazing resource as a starting point.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0-GT3co4r2y2YErbmuJw2L5t...

It's good for concepts but you can watch all his videos, think you know what linear algebra is about, and still not know how to calculate anything. You have to do exercises if you want to actually learn math.

I made that mistake when I started university. I managed quite well in high school without doing lots of exercises. Didn’t work quite as well later and I had to sit and really work through the exercises.

3B1B has stated that the series is mostly useful for summarizing or augmenting existing knowledge after taking the class; it's not for learning Linear Algebra fresh. If you sum all the minutes in the 3B1B videos it's basically the length of one video from a university course.

Agree, I said starting point assuming that he has some basic knowledge as he is struggling so he must know something.

For more advanced linear algebra I would recommend the class from Prof. Gilbert at MIT.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE7DDD91010BC51F8

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra...

What is your recommendation?

I'm not sure about recommending video courses because... there are so few people who have taken up the burden of producing a full Linear Algebra video course. It's sad. But I would at least say that whether you're following Gilbert Strang or someone else, you should be following with a book as well.

There's another guy, Jim Hefferon of St Michael's College, who has written a full book for his own class and produced a full video course on Linear Algebra (all free).

https://hefferon.net/linearalgebra/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnTa9XtvmfI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJ6YwBN7Ya8

I totally agree with you and that is why I have also added to the post the link to the open course MIT site.

I also believe that is quite naive thinking that you can learn math in some depth just watching videos (at least with my capacity). For me it is a way to keep some pace and order when learning and, as you say, to find some bibliography and material that is being used by the professor.

Linear algebra is _much_ more complicated than normal algebra

I think the sort of visualizations that are around on Youtube are great for those who don't "get" maths easily and need another angle to help them understand. Although 3Blue1Brown is not for beginners there are other beginner resources.

For example, this goes right back to basic algebra but is a very well explained with the afore mentioned visualizations.

Veritasium - How Imaginary Numbers Were Invented https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUzklzVXJwo

Not to pick on your response, but every time I see a thread about not understanding math, I think *my people!!!*. I come to these threads hoping to find answers, and all I see are “read this calculus textbook” or “3blue1brown”! I watched this whole linear algebra series about 7 times and I just don’t get it. There’s something about the way people explain math that just isn’t intuitive to me, like it’s too disconnected from reality or something. I wonder if I’m not the only one…

I really really think math is in fact harder than other things people do, and math people are using weird definitions of words to hide it.

Like, when they say something is easy, they might mean "It's easy if you know all this foundational stuff that you could learn in six months".

Everything else technical has shortcuts. Nobody knows how WiFi works, they use a module. If they do, they're probably a specialist.

But math has almost no shortcuts almost by definition. If it did we wouldn't call it math we'd call it using a math library.

It's the same shock I have practicing music, or why I can't drive, or why it takes me 2 whole minutes to line up a jig to cut a 2x4.

What programmers do is on the screen more than in the head. There's no "practice this kick 10000 times". When you see drawPixel(x,y, hexcolor)... that's... all there is to know about that function besides how long it takes.

Things that DO require skills that have to be learned, rather than just facts you have to be familiar with, seem shockingly difficult compared to anything in a JS app.

I was going to add my own post recommending 3Blue1Brown. I'm glad you've already recommended it :)

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