What would you recommend for building a strong linear algebra foundation?
Would highly recommend https://mathacademy.com/courses/linear-algebra or https://mathacademy.com/courses/mathematics-for-machine-lear...
I originally spent time working through practice problems from one of Strang's books, now really appreciate how systematic math academy is in assessing, building a custom curriculum, then doing spaced repetition.
there's a strang text on computational science that was much more my speed (less of the baby talk and repetitive manual arithmetic exercises) and i think that some of the revisions that came later (+ "learning with data") were better.
i did not find doing endless exercises of gaussian elimination or qr factorization by hand on small matrices to be all that enlightening.
this michigan course looks awesome!
I think this post (from a math academy employee) has a good argument for why these sorts of exercises are important. It's about basic arithmetic, but I think it applies to tedious things like performing gaussian elimination on small matrices as well.
https://www.justinmath.com/if-you-want-to-learn-algebra-you-...
I like to come at it from both angles - higher level with useful applications, and then lower level "I could maybe implement this if I had to" exercises. The latter are tedious, and hard to motivate effort for without the former. Ultimately, as the post argues, I agree that if you don't understand the lower level (tedious) operations, you will only get so far in your ability to apply LA.
If you can handle it, fabulous. If not, you're really in deep doo-doo. There did not seem to be a half-way to me. Astounding exercises, and also some are astoundingly hard.