He made linear algebra fun

A fun anecdote: I taught him some machine learning for an afternoon! He used to spend a few months per year in Oxford, and he had gotten in touch with my PhD advisor to ask some ML questions, as at the time he was writing his new book about linear algebra and learning from data. My advisor couldn't make it to their meeting so he sent me at the last minute instead. So bewildered me, a PhD student, met with Gilbert Strang to explain him some basic machine learning concepts! Interestingly, whenever I'd asked if he was already familiar with some concept, he'd always say no, which I suspect was a strategy to hear it explained in new words.

Anyway, Gil is a very polite and kind person, his encounter will stay a great memory.

I started taking Gilbert Strang's "new" course, "Matrix Methods In Data Analysis, Signal Processing, And Machine Learning" (18.065), in my free time after hearing about his retirement news.

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-065-matrix-methods-in-data-an...

It's been 17 years since I took 18.06 with Professor Strang and I've always been disappointed with my grasp of Linear Algebra, especially as it's become more and more of an important and applicable topic. It very much stopped then and I've never felt terribly confident in it.

The course is great because it starts with a 6 lecture refresher that brings you back up to speed on the basics of Linear Algebra before diving into the meat of the course.

To avoid being completely 100% on the Strang bandwagon, his lectures are a little off the cuff and could probably benefit from some visual aids or interactive tools outside of white boards to help students visualize what's really going on with these matrices, but the current version of the course (https://github.com/mitmath/18065/tree/main/psets) has a bunch of Julia IJupyter Notebook assignments that help you get down and dirty with what you're really trying to learn - the application of Linear Algebra.

That brings me back. Strang probably saved my computer science degree. That professor I had in linear algebra and me really couldn't communicate and without Strangs lectures (to his credit, my professor recommended them) I wouldn't have stood a chance.

Thanks, professor. And enjoy your well-earned retirement.

I had very intelligent linear algebra professor in college but he was, in my opinion, a very poor communicator. I paid attention to lectures and stared at the text, but couldn't really understand the material. For the first part of a linear algebra course, students who don't mind blindly following mechanical processes for solving problems can do very well. Unfortunately I'm one of those people who tends to reject the process until I understand why it works.

If it wasn't for Strang's thoughtful and sometimes even entertaining lectures via OCW, I probably would have failed the course. Instead, as the material became considerably more abstract and actually required understanding, I had my strongest exam scores. I didn't even pay attention in class. I finished with an A. Although my first exam was a 70/100, below the class average, the fact that I got an A overall suggests how poorly the rest of the class must have done on the latter material, where I felt my strongest thanks to the videos.

So anyway, thank you Gilbert Strang.

I struggled with linear algebra in college, in part because my professor had a tenuous grasp of the English language. Strang's book was our textbook, and I did a bit of digging and found the OCW lectures. I stopped going to class, and instead would spend the time at the library to watch Strang's lectures and take notes.

I was one of the very few students to ace the class, and I will be forever grateful.

Gil needs to be remembered as one of the key people that helped AI developments behind the scenes by having students master linear algebra! I hope you enjoy your retirement in health and peace!

I took a combination linear algebra/series course in college and barely remembered anything from it. Years later, when I was learning 3D graphics, almost any time I did matrix-matrix or matrix-vector multiplication, I had to look up a formula or painfully work through remembering how it worked. My attempts to memorize the simple algorithm all failed.

Then I bought Strang's book, watched the OCW lectures, and did the homework. Now any time I have to do or think about a matrix multiplication, Strang's voice echoes in my head, "combinations of columns." There is something special about his words, his tone of voice, and his repetition, which all together make it click for me.

A small note, to those who like Podcasts: Gilbert Strang has been on Lex's Podcast in 2019 (damn, time flies nowadays):

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lEZPfmGCEk0

I really appreciated the sentence following the title, because I was thinking this would be an obituary. And, to make things better, there's an informative and very sweet video interview with him at the end of the article. Even in that, he takes a didactic approach, teaching other teachers how to teach.

Whether one likes or dislikes mathematics, it's hard to argue that he was anything but captivating in the classroom.

My linear algebra professor put a lot of effort into showing us the processes; how to do things, how and why they worked. Unfortunately they spent no time showing us how this stuff was actually used in the real world, and so for me it all went in one ear and out the other. A buddy of mine said that his professor spent about half an hour discussing some applications of linear algebra, and just that half hour lecture made the subject much more palatable.

Then a few years later, I took a computer graphics class for my CS degree, and we were learning how to render a 3D object on a 2D monitor. And of course we used linear algebra, and then it made perfect sense. I figure all the people in the math department that cared about practical applications had left to join the CS department, or EE, or Physics or whatever. So the math department, at least at my university, had only the people who just cared about the theory, which just didn't work for my brain.

I know this article is about Strang from the context of his retirement a few weeks ago, but the title is clickbait.

51 more comments here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36038635

Thanks to Him I've learned how to solve a linear algebra problem even when I had no clue what to do. He was/is absolute champion in that. At the exam, I've used his methods to approach the problem and my solutions were real different from what my examiner expected - so much that he marked my solutions as wrong(! :D), I had to point out that "wait; don't!, it IS correct" so the test correcting person had to actualy go though my solutions and proofs and really check them. I was right and passed the test.

Thank you so much Sir! OCW rullz!

Never took his courses but used his book. My linear algebra teacher was awesome. The two changed my life.

MIT's profs Strang and the late professor Winston have positively changed my life. I knew it was him from the title and was worried he ... yeah.

I remember watching his lectures 17 years ago online when I was a teenager. That was the first online course I've done and it was on MIT OpenCourseWare.

Then, when I was actually getting a math degree years later in Manchester, UK, I got the highest score on the linear algebra exam out of all the classes I did. I doubt I would have done so well without Strang.

Strang course is available on YT as part of MIT OCW. Amazing lecturer.

Linear algebra was one of my favourite series of subjects during my mathematics degrees. It has always been fun.

There was only one rocky moment I can recollect, in first year after a three lecture proof which the lecturer finished with words along the lines of: "I won't go through this again because you wouldn't understand it the second time either." Quite possibly true, although I understood the steps of the proof the theorem itself wasn't at all obvious. In later years it became so.

I watched a bit of his lectures on YouTube, it wasn't very fun lol

Hamming lectures though.... those are great

I struggled with a very deficient linear algebra course from my local university in 2009-2010. Fortunately I discovered Gilbert Strang's book and OCW lectures, which gave me the motivation to continue. I still own that copy.

I have listened to his lectures but found it hard to follow his train of thoughts and pace and I am sure I am in the minority :). What worked somewhat is listening to 2x speed.

For those unfamiliar: Dr. Strang is still very much alive and active and involved in math; he just retired from his full-time job at MIT.

He is a legend in linear algebra, and probably will be for a long time. His video lectures have proven invaluable, benefiting millions.

I tried a linear algebra course once; guess I got the wrong teacher, checked out in 3 weeks.

A few teachers have the juice, most have the pulp.

There's no shortcut to Linear Algebra understanding. Most of reasoning is boring, lack of creativity, dry as hell.

This headline sounds like somebody died.

I just watched that video in the article of his last lecture and it was indeed fun!

This dude taught the Lin alg courses that went on MitX. Super good!