Hacker News Reader

Comment by boristsr | Hacker News Reader

This is still my go-to math book for game dev. Excellent writing style.

I'd also advise it for anyone getting into ML or LLMs, the intuition it can help you build up around the linear algebra stuff like vectors and matrices is very helpful for understanding what's going on in ML.

View on HN

The cool thing about graphics programming is that often times you aren't even doing "linear algebra" strictly.

A lot of the math for 3D graphics programming uses the concepts of affine spaces/transformations since standard 3x3 matrices don't have enough information to support translation/projection. I had no clue about this branch of math at all until I started learning graphics programming--in fact I think graphics programming requires you to learn the most math of just about any discipline of computer science outside theoretical computer science. The amount of math you need to truly "understand" path tracing is immense.

Homogeneous coordinates is still linear algebra in a 4D space instead of the obvious 3 you would naively pick. Kinda like quaternions where adding an extra degree of freedom suddenly works around some expressivity problem you didn't really know you had but clearly it solves (e.g. gimble lock on euler angles). But the term linear algebra covers high dimensional uses like training neural networks, its the thing that gives us the matrix formulation of stuff.

Failed all my maths exams all the way through school. Us kids: "Teacher when we will we ever use this crap in real life?"

Me: *becomes 3D game developer, has to write 3D entire 3D engines from scratch*

They always say school is wasted on kids :D

Reply on news.ycombinator.com