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Comment by SixSigma | Hacker News Reader

I watched Prof. Strang's Linear Algebra courseware, great stuff. He is a wonderful teacher.

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

As someone who hadn't studied it for 20 years, it was invaluable to revisit the subject as an adult with the ability to reflect "ah, I can use that for... " instead of "Ok but when am I ever going to use this"

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Those lectures are fantastic. Pro-tip: watch them at 2.5x speed (you'll keep up just fine, and you can always pause to play with the concepts in Sage or whatever).

Bonus: when you switch him back to normal speed, he sounds stoned out of his mind.

This is a great tip. I've been using it for a few years now to watch various lectures on youtube--especially mathematics. Professors lecturing mathematics tend to speak slowly since they don't want to say anything erroneous. Speeding them up is usually amazing. For youtube; open the javascript console in your browser and type '$('video').playbackRate = 2.5;'. I've found that each lecturer usually has their own magic number regarding speed--after watching someone for a few hours and varying the speed you can usually find it.

His lectures are wonderful! In college I skipped my regular Linear Algebra lectures, and used the time slot in my schedule to watch his MIT lectures instead.

I ended up scoring one of the highest grades in the class.

Finding out the Fourier transform was a way to multiply matrices was a mind blower :)

I suppose you mean this?

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06sc-linear-algebr...

I was a bit confused by your statement. You mean that the FFT can be done by matrix multiplication? I tried to interpret your statement the other way around, that you can somehow transform two matrices before you multiply them, trying to fit it into the convolution theorem, but I couldn't make sense of it that way.

I was puzzled as well. There is an analogous of the FFT method of multiplying polynomials and integers to the matrix multiplication case [1], but it is not as simple and probably does not belong in an introduction to linear algebra.

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0307321v2

As someone who did work at a University who also loved classes I would bring friends who were visiting to classes and every time they would say something like this, "I hated Philosophy as a college student, but somehow now I loved every second of that class." They were always surprised by that experience.

Incredible. I learned LA in school but it didn't click 100% until I watched Strang's lectures. I think they are ideal for someone who's already reasonably comfortable with matrices and vectors, but wants to see that higher connection and beauty. His lecture deriving the determinant from a few simple properties is magical to me. His emphasis on the fundamental subspaces of a matrix, and the geometric interpretation over the equation-solving one, are ideal for anyone who thinks visually/spatially.

That was the first online lecture series I ever watched, and I've been hooked ever since. I am overflowing with gratitude that so many professors at the world's best schools have put their lectures online. It is so good for a student like me, who went to a liberal arts school that didn't offer many advanced math or CS courses, and learns better from lectures than books. Strang's Linear Algebra course was one of the first way back in 2002. You're right, he is a wonderful teacher.

Well, I was going to say "you should also check out Walter Lewin's Physics lectures, they are equally stunning"

But it seems MIT took them down

http://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/2ope15/mit_indefini...

This borders on criminal and is certainly a tragedy.

I'm quite struck and emotional about it.

This OCW was my lifeline during my college Linear Algebra course. Learned almost all the course material from 18.06 videos. Awesome, awesome stuff.

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