Essential Math for Games Programmers

this is absolutely wonderful, as someone who dabbles in gamedev on the side this is immensely useful (just like gameprogrammingpatterns.com).

I love math, it is my favorite subject (numbers are beautiful) but sometimes I don't know the concepts for the math I am trying to apply, this definitely helps fill in some gaps.

I really enjoyed the link. The simple explanations are great. Thanks.

Indeed. All this is hardly essential.

Yep. Things like using dictionary learning for skinning models is overkill. Not to mention its not practical for realtime applications like games. Might be useful for animators though or devs writing animating tools.

I'd argue that the Grassmann algebra is simpler than linear algebra. Deriving the determinant from its definition makes very little sense to me even today but it falls out pretty naturally from the definition of wedge product, i.e. the coefficient of the highest degree wedge product. Also, a lot of the operations in geometric algebra have pretty much direct geometric analogs whereas in linear algebra you have to jump through some hoops to figure out what the formulas mean geometrically.

> basic linear algebra backwards and forwards

On that note, here's a short tutorials about linear algebra on fast forward: http://minireference.com/static/tutorials/linear_algebra_in_...

It's aimed at students who are in a rush so it doesn't cover too many applications (the cool parts of LA), but the essential ideas are there.

speaking of linear algebra, i just ran into this oddity: manual affine matrix calc differs from what css-transform computes. why?

http://jsfiddle.net/dfqhw64q/6/

I'd rather have a list of book-recommendations.

And it gets especially annoying when those slides are rendered as a static PDF file. Lots of information gets repeated. It was especially ironic in the slides about Frames, Dictionaries and K-SVD, as they were talking about doing efficient and sparse representation of things.

Not at all. Slides are to support a talk. I find most of them fairly useless without the speaker audio/video.

All the exciting ones.

Most people have a wrong conception of what math means. Math encompasses large parts of pretty much any engineering discipline including programming. At the end of the day the foundations of programming are boolean logic, turing machines, lambda calculus, etc. Those are all technically math so when you say you're horrid at math and that's why you code that doesn't really make any sense.

More generally, using any kind of analytical approach to solve problems is math.

Is professor of mathematics "engineering related"? If not, it's a trivial example :-P

More generally, there are a number of fields that rely on statistics and modelling of various sophistication. Parts of finance, insurance, polling...

Even if all development moves over to a selection of a few engines (which won't happen), you'd still have to have people who make the engines, and they don't pop out of nowhere.